Trump cites health care issues in Greenland saying he's sending a hospital ship. His claims are off

U.S. President Donald Trump said in a Truth Social post Saturday that he would deploy a hospital ship to Greenland, alleging many people there are sick and not receiving care, even though both of the U.S. Navy’s hospital ships are undergoing maintenance at a shipyard in Alabama.

The announcement prompted a defense of Greenland’s health care system from its prime minister in the latest point of friction with Trump, who has frequently talked about seizing Greenland, which is a semiautonomous territory of NATO ally Denmark.

Here is a closer look at the facts:

Referring to his special envoy to the Arctic territory, Trump said, “Working with the fantastic Governor of Louisiana, Jeff Landry, we are going to send a great hospital boat to Greenland to take care of the many people who are sick, and not being taken care of there.”

THE FACTS: There have been no reports of major illnesses in Greenland lately and it was not clear which sickness Trump was referring to.

All of Greenland, which has a population of around 57,000 people, is served by the Queen Ingrid Hospital in the capital Nuuk, according to the Danish Medical Journal. The territory also has several regional health centers.

Most health care services in Greenland are free for citizens and permanent residents. This includes treatment by general practitioners, medical specialists and hospitals, health centers, prescription medicine, public dental care and home nursing care, according to the website of the Nordic Council of Ministers, which is the official body for intergovernmental cooperation in the Nordic Region.

In response to Trump’s post, Greenlandic Prime Minister Jens-Frederik Nielsen stressed the region’s free health care system and pointed out the differences in a gibe at the U.S. system.

“We have a public health care system where treatment is free for citizens. That is a deliberate choice — and a fundamental part of our society,” Nielsen said. “That is not how it works in the USA, where it costs money to see a doctor.”

Despite free health service, there are “major public health challenges” on the vast island, according to the Center for Public Health in Greenland.

Many of those challenges are related to undergoing “profound changes from a hunting society to a modern industrial and knowledge society” within a short period of time. Increasingly, people suffer from illnesses such as obesity, diabetes and cardiovascular disease.

Anna Wangenheim, Greenland's minister for health and persons with disabilities, recently posted an “urgent” request on her Facebook page saying the “national health service currently needs dentists for 3 different towns: Aasiaat, Paamiut, and Nanortalik.”

Despite difficult access to medical services in remote areas and a shortage of staff, notable improvements have been achieved in Greenland, which only assumed political responsibility for its own healthcare system in 1992, said Lene Seibæk, a professor at the Institute of Health and Nature at the University of Greenland.

“In 2020, life expectancy in Greenland was approximately 71 years for men and 77 years for women, representing an increase of approximately six years for men and five to six years for women since the 1990s and exceeding the global average,” Seibæk added.

“It’s on the way!!!” Trump wrote in his Truth Social post, saying one of the hospital ships already was headed to Greenland.

THE FACTS: The USNS Mercy and USNS Comfort are at a shipyard in Mobile, Alabama, according to social media posts from the shipyard showing the pair of white hospital ships alongside each other in late January. Publicly available ship tracking data show both ships are still in the shipyard.

The Comfort arrived at the shipyard in the southern state on Jan. 23 and is expected to remain there through April, according to the government contract for the work.

Repairs to the Mercy, which arrived there in August, have run past their expected completion date. Government contract records show the ship is slated for more repairs in March in a shipyard in the northwest state of Oregon.

Should either ship be rushed out, it would need additional time before being ready to deploy. The standard crew of a U.S. hospital ship does not include the full complement of medical staff needed to man the vast medical facilities, which include 12 operating rooms and 1,000 hospital beds. Normally, the ships would draw doctors, nurses, corpsmen and supplies from hospitals surrounding their home ports of either Norfolk, Virginia, or San Diego before setting sail.

Landry, the Louisiana governor serving as Trump's special envoy, echoed the president’s claim Sunday on X that “many villages and small towns lack basic services that Americans often take for granted.”

Landry added that “small settlements are without permanent doctors, diagnostic tools, or specialist care — forcing residents to travel great distances for vital treatments that should be available at home.”

THE FACTS: While medical service is sometimes not physically available in all settlements of the vast territory, telemedicine plays an important role for people living remotely.

Patients in areas without the necessary health care also can be transported to the national hospital or regional facilities. In complex cases, patients can be flown to Denmark for medical treatment with the government paying for transportation and treatment.

Rural Americans, in comparison, have long faced challenges in accessing critical health care, in part due to financial inequities and long travel times. The barriers have worsened in the past decade as more maternity wards close, pharmacies struggle to stay in business and rural hospitals and clinics brace for federal Medicaid cuts.

Since 2010, 152 rural hospitals, many in the southern U.S., have cut inpatient services or closed entirely, according to data from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The expansion of telehealth can ease some inequities, experts say, but it is not a universal solution while many rural areas face provider shortages and unreliable broadband.

Landry’s state is no exception. Most of Louisiana's parishes are fully or partially rural and 73% of residents live in areas without enough primary care providers, 86% without enough dental providers and 93% without sufficient mental health providers, according to the state’s health department.

Grieshaber reported from Berlin, Toropin from Washington, D.C., and Shastri from Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

Find AP Fact Checks here: https://apnews.com/APFactCheck.

FILE - The USNS Mercy enters the Port of Los Angeles, March 27, 2020, in Los Angeles. (AP Photo/Mark J. Terrill, File)

FILE - Greenlandic Prime Minister Jens-Frederik Nielsen speaks during a protest against Trump's policy towards Greenland in front of the US consulate in Nuuk, Greenland, Saturday, Jan. 17, 2026. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka, File)

FILE - Houses covered in snow are seen on the coast of a sea inlet of Nuuk, Greenland, Friday, March 7, 2025. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka, File)

FILE - The U.S. Navy hospital ship USNS Comfort docks at the Cristobal port, operated by the Panama Ports Company, in Colon, Panama, Sunday, June 29, 2025. (AP Photo/Matias Delacroix, File)

NEW YORK (AP) — U.S. stocks rose Tuesday after getting a reminder that the artificial-intelligence boom may also have an upside.

The S&P 500 climbed 0.8% and recovered nearly three-quarters of its sharp drop from the day before. The Dow Jones Industrial Average added 370 points, or 0.8%, and the Nasdaq composite gained 1%.

Advanced Micro Devices helped lead the market and rallied 8.8% after announcing a multiyear deal where it will supply chips to Meta Platforms to help power its AI ambitions. Under the agreement, Meta also got the right to buy up to 160 million shares of AMD stock for 1 cent each, depending in part on how many chips Meta ultimately buys.

It’s a reminder of the excitement that built in recent years about the billions of dollars pouring into AI, which could remake the world and create a more productive economy.

It also helped produce a sharp turnaround from the prior day, when worries about the potential downsides of AI shook Wall Street, particularly companies and industries that investors fear could be made obsolete. Industries as far flung as software, trucking logistics and financial services have recently seen investors suddenly and aggressively punish them for potentially being under threat.

IBM rose 2.7% to recover some of its 13.1% drop from Monday, which was its worst since 2000.

The pain has also filtered out to the private-equity industry, with fears building that loans it made to software companies dependent on recurring revenue may have less of a chance of getting repaid. Blue Owl Capital rose 2.8% to trim its loss for the young year so far to 28.2%.

On Tuesday, Anthropic unveiled new tools for businesses to use with its Claude AI assistant. They covered everything from human-resources work to engineering to investment banking.

The event suggested that fears about AI supplanting existing software, rather than merely making it easier to use, may be overblown, according to Dan Ives, an analyst at Wedbush. “While these use cases are impressive, the reality is that these new AI tools will not rip and replace existing software ecosystems and data environments with these AI tools only as useful as the data it can reach.”

One of the tools allows users to bring data on financial markets from FactSet into Claude. FactSet Research Systems’ stock jumped 5.9% for one of the biggest gains in the S&P 500, though it’s still down 30.6% for the year so far.

Other companies hit hard by worries about AI competition also trimmed their losses for the year. Salesforce climbed 4.1%, and AppLovin rose 3.3%.

Outside of AI worries, big U.S. companies continued to report mostly better profits for the end of 2025 than analysts expected.

Keysight Technologies rallied 23.1% for the biggest gain in the S&P 500 after topping analysts’ expectations for profit and revenue in the latest quarter. It also said revenue in the current quarter could rise by roughly 30% from a year earlier.

Home Depot rose 2% after likewise delivering stronger profit and revenue than analysts expected. That was even with what CEO Ted Decker called “ongoing consumer uncertainty.”

All told, the S&P 500 rose 52.32 points to 6,890.07. The Dow Jones Industrial Average added 370.44 to 49,174.50, and the Nasdaq composite climbed 236.41 to 22,863.68.

In stock markets abroad, indexes were mixed in Europe amid mostly modest movements.

The swings were larger in Asia. South Korea’s Kospi jumped 2.1%, while Hong Kong’s Hang Seng dropped 1.8%. Stocks in Shanghai rose 0.9% after reopening following a holiday of more than a week.

In the bond market, Treasury yields held relatively steady after a report said that confidence among U.S. consumers improved by more than economists expected. The yield on the 10-year Treasury held at 4.03%, where it was late Monday.

AP Business Writers Matt Ott and Elaine Kurtenbach contributed.

A pedestrian walks outside the New York Stock Exchange during a snow storm, Monday, Feb. 23, 2026, in New York. (AP Photo/Seth Wenig)

Snow falls outside the New York Stock Exchange, Monday, Feb. 23, 2026, in New York. (AP Photo/Seth Wenig)

Snow falls outside the New York Stock Exchange, Monday, Feb. 23, 2026, in New York. (AP Photo/Seth Wenig)

Currency traders watch monitors near a screen showing the Korea Composite Stock Price Index (KOSPI), right, and the foreign exchange rate between U.S. dollar and South Korean won at the foreign exchange dealing room of the Hana Bank headquarters in Seoul, South Korea, Tuesday, Feb. 24, 2026. (AP Photo/Ahn Young-joon)

A currency trader stretches near a screen showing the Korea Composite Stock Price Index (KOSPI), center, and the foreign exchange rate between U.S. dollar and South Korean won, left, at the foreign exchange dealing room of the Hana Bank headquarters in Seoul, South Korea, Tuesday, Feb. 24, 2026. (AP Photo/Ahn Young-joon)