MAINE, USA — On a rainy Tuesday morning in early May, Daphne Russell, a community paramedic with United Ambulance Service, knocks on the door of a home in Lewiston. She’s there, as she is each Tuesday, to check on one of her patients: monitoring vitals and sorting through medications.

The visit is a part of a United’s community paramedicine program, in which staff provide free, in-home primary care to patients who have been referred by hospitals or primary care providers, in an effort to reduce hospitalizations and decrease the number of ambulance rides and emergency department visits.

But Russell’s visits with such patients are at risk after the federal government abruptly terminated $1 million in grants to community paramedicine programs in Maine. The latest round of the grants was awa

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