Trump-Loving County Loses Labor And Delivery Unit Thanks To Medicaid Cuts
Now patients will have to drive an hour and a half to give birth.
Things don’t seem to be going especially well in the parts of the country that voted for Donald Trump last November. Sure, they don’t have ICE agents tear-gassing trick-or-treaters or breaking the ribs of elderly citizens, but it still hasn’t been all peaches and cream.
Iowa, Nebraska, and other rural states are on the verge of an economic crisis, caused in part by the fact that Trump made it so they can’t sell soybeans to China anymore (while bailing out Argentina so that their farmers can). Louisiana had a major whooping cough outbreak that killed two infants and their health department — run by a state surgeon general who loves Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and thought COVID vaccines were “dangerous” — just didn’t bother to tell anyone about it for months while simultaneously ending the “promotion” of vaccines like the one for whooping cough. Things have been so bad that even Arizona, North Carolina, Kansas, and Kentucky have joined blue states in their lawsuit against the Trump administration for refusing to release the SNAP contingency funds.
And, of course, there are the hospital closures.
This week, St. Mary’s Sacred Heart Hospital in Lavonia, Georgia — in Franklin County, 86 percent of which voted for Trump — announced the closure of its labor and delivery unit, meaning that patients living in the area are now going to be forced to drive or be driven up to an hour and a half away if they’d like to give birth in a hospital. This will be the 26th labor and delivery unit closure in the United States this year.
In a statement to CBS Atlanta, the hospital stated that, while they had been plagued with issues from the start, the congressional cuts to Medicaid were the final straw.
“This decision follows an extensive 18-month discernment process that included intensive efforts to recruit additional physicians, create new partnerships, and pursue incremental funding sources. Changing demographics in our region, physician recruitment challenges, increasing outmigration for labor and delivery services, and recent Congressional cuts to Medicaid solidified this decision.”
The fact is, hospitals in rural areas rely heavily on programs like Medicaid and Medicare to stay open, because they simply don’t have as many patients as hospitals in major population centers.
This is yet another way that capitalism simply does not make any sense for health care. Were hospitals funded by state and federal governments, instead of having to rely on individual patients, it would be far more possible to ensure proper coverage. There could be some amount of central planning. As of right now, we don’t have that.
We have an ob-gyn shortage in this country. Hell, we have a physician shortage in this country. We have a situation where over 40 percent of US counties are in areas where people have to drive an hour or more to get to a trauma center. Eighty percent of counties are some kind of health care desert or another. One in three Americans lives in these counties.
If we were any kind of smart at all, we would make medical school free, pump funding into medical internships (which have decreased significantly due to federal cuts), ban pharmaceutical ads, and establish single-payer health care, which would save us all the money that is being spent on administrative billing, exorbitant healthcare executive salaries, and on the pharmaceuticals we don’t negotiate prices for like every other country on earth, so that we could properly fund and staff hospitals, emergency centers, and labor and delivery units wherever they are needed. In hospitals, this is called “triage.” You take care of the most dire situations first — instead of, say, building a gilded ballroom for yourself.
In addition to the Medicaid cuts, the hospital also says it has had trouble recruiting physicians and other staff to work at the hospital over the last year. Gee, why might that be? Maybe it’s because people don’t want to up and move to work in a rural hospital in danger of closing, for fear they will have upended their lives and their children’s lives. Maybe it’s because they don’t want to be in a situation where they have to choose between following the law in Georgia, with regards to their abortion ban, and saving a patient’s life.
There have been several deeply frightening incidents in Georgia hospitals in the years since Roe was overturned. I don’t know about you, but if I spent years and tens of thousands of dollars to become an ob-gyn, I don’t know that I would put myself in the position of being the person who has to let a miscarrying woman die of sepsis rather than treat her properly. That’s kind of a lot to ask of people.
PREVIOUSLY!
A survey of ob-gyns in the state found that many of them had personally witnessed incidents in which miscarrying patients had been harmed by the state’s laws.
According to one survey respondent, “[a] patient was rejected from several hospitals before arriving at our hospital for inevitable miscarriage at 10 weeks. She was bleeding heavily…” The doctor reported that eventually, the patient’s exam showed no fetal heart tones, allowing the doctor to perform an abortion without running afoul of Georgia’s abortion law.
Another OBGYN reported having “[s]een at least one person seeking medical termination out of State who then need D&C [dilation and curettage] for incomplete [abortion] and seem to have delayed presenting to care due to concern we would hesitate to/not take care of them.”
St. Mary’s, of course, is a Catholic hospital — which means they wouldn’t provide abortion care even if it were still legal. But with the law the way that it is, and without even the option to send patients to another nearby hospital for immediate treatment, it is likely even less appealing for those who care about saving their patients’ lives.
There are similar issues in Iowa, which currently has the lowest number of ob-gyns per capita in the nation. Doctors there say that they believe that one of the main factors driving the shortage is the state’s abortion ban. Incredibly enough, many people just don’t want to work in situations where saving a patient's life could mean losing their career, their life savings, or their freedom.
Texas is dealing with the same thing as well.
Nothing has to be this way. I may not agree with most of the people in these states politically, but I do want them to have health care. I do not want them giving birth in a broken-down elevator like some 1980s sitcom trope. I do not want to think of anyone going into labor and having to drive or be driven an hour and a half to deliver the baby, because that is absurd. I don’t want any of these people to die of sepsis because they had a miscarriage and the doctors were afraid to treat them. I also want them to have access to the abortions we all damn well know they get anyway.
Let’s hope that, eventually, they figure out that maybe they want more for themselves as well, and decide to vote that way.
Let's add another little twist to this one.
That new $100,000 visa fee?
yeah, that's going to hit a lot of these rural hospitals as well.
Because many of the Doctors and nurses are from overseas, mostly because the rural hospitals can't compete with the more urban places due to quality of life and salary.
I voted to make other people, especially those in cities just as miserable as I am. Why is it getting worse for me?!1!. - rural Republicans