‘We need some hope': can a rural hospital on the brink survive Trump's bill?

The Guardian

3 days ago

When her severely allergic toddler, Josie, began gasping for breath in the middle of the night, Krissy Cunningham knew there was only one place she could get to in time to save her daughter's life.
For 74 years, Pemiscot Memorial hospital has been the destination for those who encounter catastrophe in Missouri's poorest county, a rural stretch of farms and towns in its south-eastern Bootheel region. 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.
For many in Pemiscot county, its emergency room is the closest available without taking a 30-minute drive across the Mississippi river to Tennessee or the state line to Arkansas, a range that can make the difference between life and death for victims of shootings, overdoses or accidents on the road. In the wee hours of one spring morning, it was there that Josie received the breathing treatments and a racemic epinephrine shot that made her wheezing subside.
'There is no way I would have made it to one of the farther hospitals, if it wouldn't have been here. Her airway just would have closed off, and I probably would have been doing CPR on my daughter on the side of the road,' recalled Cunningham, a nurse who sits on the hospital's board.
Yet its days of serving its community may be numbered. In May, the hospital's administration went public with the news that after years of struggling with high rates of uninsured patients and low reimbursement rates from insurers, they may have to close. And even if they do manage to navigate out of their current crisis, Pemiscot Memorial's leaders see a new danger on the horizon: the 'big, beautiful bill' Republicans pushed through Congress earlier this month, at Donald Trump's request.
Centered around an array of tax cuts as well as funds for the president's mass deportation plans, the bill will mandate the largest funding reduction in history to Medicaid, the federal healthcare program supporting low-income and disabled Americans. That is expected to have ripple effects nationwide, but will hit particularly hard in Pemiscot county and other rural areas, where hospitals tend to have frail margins and disproportionately rely on Medicaid to stay afloat.
'If Medicaid drops, are we going to be even collecting what we're collecting now?' asked Jonna Green, the chairwoman of Pemiscot Memorial's board, who estimated 80% of their revenue comes from Medicaid as well as Medicare, another federal health program primarily for people 65 and older. 'We need some hope.'
The changes to Medicaid will phase in beginning in late 2026, and require enrollees to work, volunteer or attend school 80 hours a month, with some exceptions. States are also to face new caps on provider taxes, which they use to fund their Medicaid programs. All told, the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office forecasts that 10 million people nationwide will lose their healthcare due to the bill, which is nonetheless expected to add $3.4tn to the federal budget deficit through 2034.
Trump carried Missouri, a midwestern state that has veered sharply away from the Democratic party over the past three decades, with more than 58% of the vote last November. In Pemiscot county, where census data shows more than a quarter of residents are below the poverty line and the median income is just over $40,000 a year, he was the choice of 74% of voters, and Republican lawmakers representing the county played a notable role in steering his tax and spending bill through Congress.
Senator Josh Hawley publicly advocated against slashing the healthcare program, writing in the New York Times: 'If Republicans want to be a working-class party – if we want to be a majority party – we must ignore calls to cut Medicaid and start delivering on America's promise for America's working people.' He ultimately supported the bill after a $50bn fund to help rural hospitals was included, but weeks later introduced legislation that would repeal some of the very same cuts he had just voted for.
'I want to see Medicaid reductions stopped and rural hospitals fully funded permanently,' the senator said.
Jason Smith, whose district encompasses Pemiscot county and the rest of south-eastern Missouri, oversaw the crafting of the measure's tax provision as chairman of the House ways and means committee, and has argued they will bring prosperity rural areas across the state. Like others in the GOP, he has said the Medicaid cuts will ferret out 'waste, fraud and abuse', and make the program more efficient.
It's a gamble for a state that has seen nine rural hospitals close since 2015, including one in a county adjacent to Pemiscot, with a further 10 at immediate risk of going under, according to data from the Center for Healthcare Quality and Payment Reform policy group.
The Missouri Budget Project thinktank estimates that the bill will cost 170,000 of the state's residents their health coverage, largely due to work requirements that will act as difficult-to-satisfy red tape for Medicaid enrollees, while the cap on provider taxes will sap $1.9bn from the state's Medicaid program.
'There's going to be some really hard conversations over the course of the next five years, and I think that healthcare in our region will look a lot different than what it does right now,' said Karen White, CEO of Missouri Highlands Health Care, which operates federally qualified health centers providing primary and dental care across rural south-eastern Missouri. She forecasts 20% of her patients will lose Medicaid coverage through 2030.
As the bill was making its way through Congress, she contacted the offices of Smith, Hawley and Missouri's junior senator, Eric Schmitt, all politicians she had voted for, asking them to reconsider cutting Medicaid. She did not hear back.
'I love democracy. I love the fact that we as citizens can make our voices heard. And they voted the way that they felt they needed to vote. Maybe … the larger constituency reached out to them with a viewpoint that was different than mine, but I made my viewpoint heard,' White said.
Spokespeople for Schmitt and Smith did not respond to requests for comment. In response to emailed questions, a spokeswoman for Hawley referred to his introduction of the legislation to partially stop the Medicaid cuts.
Down the road from the hospital lies Hayti Heights, where there are no businesses and deep puddles form in the potholes and ditches that line roadways after every thunderstorm. Mayor Catrina Robinson has a plan to turn things around for her 500 or so residents, which involves bringing back into service the water treatment plant that is the town's main source of revenue. But that is unlikely to change much without Pemiscot Memorial.
'Half of those people that work at the hospital, they're my residents. So how they gonna pay their bills? How they gonna pay their water bill, how they gonna pay their light bill, how they gonna pay rent? This is their source of income. Then what will they do?' Robinson said.
Trump's bill does include an array of relief aimed at the working-class voters who broke for him in the last election, including tax cuts on tips and overtime pay and deductions aimed at senior citizens. It remains to be seen if whatever financial benefits those provisions bring to the workers of Pemiscot county will outweigh the impact of the stress the Medicaid cuts place on its healthcare system.
'The tax relief of server's tips and all that, that's not going to change the poverty level of our area,' said Loren Clifton, the hospital's administrative director. 'People losing their healthcare insurance absolutely will make it worse.'
Work can be found in the county's corn, wheat, soybean and rice fields, at a casino in the county seat Caruthersville and at a shipyard along the banks of the Mississippi . But Green questions if those industries would stick around if the hospital goes under, and takes with it the emergency room that often serves to stabilize critical patients before transferring them elsewhere.
'Our community cannot go without a hospital. Healthcare, employment, industry – it would devastate everything,' Green said.
The board is exploring partnerships with other companies to help keep the hospital afloat, and has applied for a federal rural emergency hospital designation which they believe will improve their reimbursements and chances of winning grants, though that will require them to give up other services that bring in revenue. For many of its leaders, the stakes of keeping the hospital open are personal.
'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,' said Brittany Osborne, Pemiscot Memorial's interim CEO.
One muggy Wednesday morning in July, Pemiscot's three county commissioners, all Republicans, gathered in a small conference room in Caruthersville's courthouse and spoke of their resolve to keep the hospital open.
'It's 50-50 right now,' commissioner Mark Cartee said of the hospital's chances of survival. 'But, as long as we have some money in the bank of the county, we're going to keep it open. We need healthcare. We got to have a hospital.'
They were comparatively sanguine about the possibility that the Medicaid work requirements would harm the facility's finances down the line.
'We got a guy around here, I guess he's still around. He's legally blind but he goes deer hunting every year,' commissioner Baughn Merideth said. 'There's just so much fraud … it sounds like we're right in the middle of it.'
A few blocks away, Jim Brands, owner of Hayden Pharmacy, the oldest in the county, had little doubt that there were those in the county who took advantage of Medicaid. He also believed that fewer enrollees in the program would mean less business for his pharmacy, and more hardship overall.
'Just seeing this community, the situation it's in, the poverty, we've got to get people to work. There are a ton of able-bodied people that could work that choose not to,' he said.
'To me, there's got to be a better way to weed out the fraud and not step on the toes of the people who need it.'