Pemiscot County, Missouri, misplaced its Walmart. Now it might lose its solely hospital.
This deeply conservative nook of rural America is getting a front-row training in what it means when Republicans say they need to “run government like a business.”
Companies exist to become profitable. And so they don’t waste their time in poverty-stricken Pemiscot County, house to lower than 16,000 residents who’ve a median family earnings that hardly clears $40,000. It’s Missouri’s poorest county. Why would any profit-driven, efficiency-minded system waste a dime right here?
The Guardian paints a grim image: “Three stories of brown brick just off Interstate 55 in the town of Hayti, the 115-bed hospital has kept its doors open even after the county’s only Walmart closed, the ranks of boarded-up gas stations along the freeway exit grew, and the population of the surrounding towns dwindled, thanks in no small part to the destruction done by tornadoes.”
That is a type of rural counties I’ve written about: depending on the federal authorities they hate.
Republican Rep. Jason Smith, proven in July, represents Pemiscot County, Missouri and voted for President Donald Trump’s Medicaid-gutting finances regulation.
Now, due to President Donald Trump and his Medicaid-gutting finances regulation, Pemiscot Memorial Hospital is hanging by a thread.
“If Medicaid drops, are we going to be even collecting what we’re collecting now?” Jonna Inexperienced, the chair of the hospital’s board, requested The Guardian. With roughly 80% of the hospital’s income coming from Medicaid and Medicare, any cuts to a hospital already on the sting of insolvency is a demise sentence. “We need some hope,” she added.
She doesn’t want hope. She and her neighbors have to cease voting for Republicans.
Trump received 74% of the vote within the county final yr. Jason Smith, their Republican congressman, did even higher, successful with 76% of the vote. And Smith was thrilled to assist the regulation that might shutter this hospital, saying in an announcement, “The One, Big, Beautiful Bill is nothing short of the greatest piece of working-class tax relief in a generation. President Trump didn’t just sign a bill into law—he unleashed America’s Golden Age.”
Positive. If “Golden Age” means no hospital.
Republican Sen. Josh Hawley received 73% of the county. He had warned that Trump’s tax invoice would devastate rural hospitals—after which he voted for it anyway.
Nevertheless, simply days after that vote, he tried to reverse course, introducing a invoice to “protect” the identical rural-hospital funding he had simply voted to intestine.
Besides … he already had.
Final week at an Axios discussion board, Hawley doubled down, warning in opposition to “experiment[ing]” with the “vitally important” federal funding that retains rural hospitals afloat.
However when it mattered—when it got here time to vote on a significant invoice—he selected as a substitute to chop wealthy folks’s taxes. He had a alternative between Missouri hospitals and billionaire handouts, and he picked the billionaires.
And right here’s the kicker: that “vitally important” funding he says he needs to guard? It doesn’t even come from Missouri. Missouri is a moocher state, propped up by federal {dollars} primarily from blue states like California, Illinois, and New York. Hawley’s constituents hate the federal authorities, however they positive love its cash.
President Donald Trump indicators his signature invoice of safety-net cuts and tax breaks for the wealthy, on the White Home on July 4, surrounded by Republican members of Congress.
As for Pemiscot County, they wished a smaller authorities to chop waste, fraud, and abuse. In actual fact, many voices quoted in that Guardian story insisted what Republicans did was okay as a result of they knew that one man. Not even kidding—take a look at this passage:
“We got a guy around here, I guess he’s still around. He’s legally blind but he goes deer hunting every year,” Baughn Merideth, a county commissioner, instructed The Guardian. “There’s just so much fraud … it sounds like we’re right in the middle of it.”
So this one “guy” in Pemiscot County—if he’s “still around”—is so filled with fraud that it’s acceptable for the county to lose its solely hospital. (Additionally, “legally blind” doesn’t imply can’t-see-anything blind. In actual fact, Iowa’s Division for the Blind says that solely about 18% of legally blind individuals are completely blind.)
Trump supporters will bend themselves into knots to keep away from blaming these enabling the crises they face.
No matter fraud could exist in Pemiscot County, it pales compared to the waste of sustaining a vital medical facility in a county the place the inhabitants has plunged from almost 47,000 within the Nineteen Forties to underneath 16,000 in the present day. When the hospital closes, extra folks will depart. The realm’s demise spiral will speed up.
“This is our home, born and raised, and you would never want to leave it. But I have a nine-year-old with cardiac problems. I would not feel safe living here without a hospital that I could take her to know if something happened,” Brittany Osborne, Pemiscot Memorial’s interim CEO, instructed The Guardian.
In the meantime, Inexperienced—the hospital board chair fearful about cuts—follows a Fb group that just lately posted a meme of Trump with the caption “Isn’t it great having a real president again?”
She says she wants “some hope”?
Onerous to think about a worse place to go on the lookout for it.
