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A clinic blames its closing on Trump's Medicaid cuts. Patients don't buy it.

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/07/13/trump-tax-bill-
medicaid-rural/

CURTIS, Nebraska — The only health clinic here is shutting down, and the 
hospital CEO has blamed Medicaid cuts in President Donald Trump’s 
signature legislation. But residents of Curtis — a one-stoplight town in 
deep-red farm country — aren’t buying that explanation.

“Anyone who’s saying that Medicaid cuts is why they’re closing is a liar,” 
April Roberts said, as she oversaw lunch at the Curtis Area Senior Center.

The retirees trickling in for fried chicken and soft-serve ice cream will 
be hit hardest when the clinic closes this fall, Roberts fears. Seniors 
who sometimes go in multiple times a month to have blood drawn will have 
to drive 40 miles to the next nearest health center. Sick people, she 
worries, will put off checkups and get sicker.

Arriving for lunch, retired Navy veteran Jim Christensen said he’d read an 
op-ed that “tried to blame everything on Trump.”

“Horse feathers,” he said, dismissing the idea.

Curtis has become an early test case of the politics of Trump’s agenda in 
rural America, where voters vulnerable to Medicaid cuts in Trump’s “One 
Big Beautiful Bill” law are reluctant to blame the president or 
congressional Republicans who approved it. Many people in Curtis have 
directed their frustration at their hospital system instead of their 
representatives in Washington.

Democrats and health care advocates are pointing to the town — population 
806 in the last census — as a first casualty of Republicans’ health care 
overhaul. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) and others have referred to the 
town on social media as a model of what’s to come for rural hospitals 
around the country. Close to half of rural hospitals nationwide already 
lose money, and analysts expect Trump’s tax and spending law to add more 
strain.

Community Hospital, the nonprofit that runs the clinic known as the Curtis 
Medical Center and a couple of other facilities in the region, plunged 
into the center of that national story when it announced on July 2 — one 
day before the bill’s passage — that a confluence of factors had made its 
Curtis outpost unsustainable. It cited years-long financial challenges, 
inflation and “anticipated federal budget cuts to Medicaid,” the public 
health insurance program for lower-income and disabled Americans.

On Thursday morning, 73-year-old Sharon Jorgensen was scared the clinic 
had already shut its doors: She called and couldn’t get someone to pick 
up. She needed a blood draw, so she went to the health center to see if 
someone was still there.

It was open, after all. And now staff had a date for the closure.

“We have until Sept. 30,” Jorgensen told another local, 63-year-old Jo 
Popp, on her way out of the small brick building. “I have to find a 
doctor. I don’t have a doctor!”

Popp would have to start taking a day off work for checkups, because of 
the drive. But she said she would try to follow the clinic’s nurse 
practitioner — one of three people on staff — wherever she went.

“She knows us,” Jorgensen said.

“Right,” Popp said. “She listens to us.”

The clinic has been here longer than many people in town can remember, and 
people are struggling to make sense of the shutdown. The changes coming 
for Medicaid are complicated, and some won’t take effect for years, which 
makes the timing even harder for residents to understand.

Many know that Trump’s bill will impose work requirements for Medicaid 
recipients, which seems reasonable to them, and some think — inaccurately 
— that the legislation was designed to end Medicaid coverage for 
undocumented immigrants. (An earlier version of the bill penalized states 
for using their own funds — separate from Medicaid — to insure the 
undocumented; that provision was stripped from the final bill on a 
technicality).

Community Hospital was already losing money, and officials said they are 
trying to make sure they remain financially viable for the 30,000 people 
they serve throughout their facilities. But the timing of their decision 
to announce the Curtis closure has stoked suspicions in the town, leaving 
some residents convinced their health provider was using the president as 
a scapegoat.

Popp, a three-time Trump voter, thought the president was cutting wasteful 
spending and didn’t think he caused the closure. Jorgensen, a registered 
Republican who never voted for Trump, was frustrated that so few of her 
neighbors believed the Medicaid cuts played a role.

“They’re huge Trumpers … and so it doesn’t matter what he does — there’s 
an excuse for it,” Jorgensen said. The retired corn and cattle farmer was 
used to being the odd one out in Frontier County, where 86 percent of the 
vote went to Trump last fall.

One of those Trump supporters walked out of the clinic.

“My heart’s good,” he told Jorgensen.

“Yay!” Jorgensen said.

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Trump repeatedly promised this year that he would not cut Medicaid. He 
expanded the GOP tent to include more low-income voters without college 
degrees, and some Republicans warned that any reduction in benefits would 
undercut their pitch that they are the new party of the working class.

But Trump and Republican lawmakers needed to offset some of the enormous 
cost of the tax cuts, deportations and other campaign promises in their 
tax and spending law. So they turned to Medicaid. The nonpartisan 
Congressional Budget Office has estimated that about 12 million people 
will lose health coverage because of the law, which is nonetheless 
projected to add trillions to the federal debt over the next decade.

Republicans say that changes like work requirements will reduce fraud and 
ensure Medicaid is available for those it was originally intended to 
serve, including pregnant women and the disabled. But researchers warn 
those requirements will create onerous paperwork that, in practice, will 
prevent eligible people from getting their benefits.

Other changes in the law will disadvantage the vast majority of states 
that expanded Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, according to 
hospital groups and policy analysts, and will reduce payments to rural 
hospitals by reining in a financing mechanism they have long relied on to 
boost federal funds.

KFF, a nonpartisan health policy research organization, estimates the bill 
would cause federal Medicaid spending in rural areas to drop by $155 
billion — more than the $50 billion lawmakers set aside in the legislation 
to shore up rural hospitals. It’s not fully clear how that $50 billion 
will be divided, adding to providers’ uncertainty.

Community Hospital declined to comment in detail on its financial picture 
but said in a statement that “to ensure long-term sustainability, we must 
prioritize what lies ahead.”

“They’re projecting where they’re going to be at over the next couple of 
years, and if it’s between jeopardizing the hospital or closing down a 
clinic, they’re going to close a clinic,” said Jed Hansen, the executive 
director of the Nebraska Rural Health Association, who expects about 
100,000 Nebraskans to lose health care as a result of the law.

Rural health care facilities run on thin margins to serve small 
communities in far-flung locations. And they tend to have more patients on 
Medicaid, many of them self-employed farmers, small business owners and 
seasonal workers more likely to need public insurance. Hospital groups and 
executives have warned that some rural hospitals that long operated at a 
loss won’t be able to stay open much longer, now that the Medicaid cuts 
have been voted in.

Nationwide, far more people oppose Trump’s bill than support it in 
polling, and Democrats hope the legislation will cost the GOP control of 
the House in the 2026 midterms.

Even in Curtis, some unease at the Medicaid cuts is percolating.

“I’m not in agreement with this bill,” said 61-year-old Brenda Wheeler, a 
Republican who voted for Trump in 2016 but then soured on him and sat out 
last year’s election. She was thinking about changing her registration to 
independent, upset at the cuts to Medicaid.

“When we talked about making America great again, I don’t think this is 
what we all had in mind,” she said, as she stopped by the clinic.

Down the road on the town’s main street lined with American flags, Kerri 
Kemp said she didn’t like the Medicaid cuts either. The 47-year-old got 
Medicaid coverage after Nebraska voters chose to expand eligibility for 
the program in 2018, adopting an optional part of President Barack Obama’s 
health care overhaul. But it was hard to document all her work as a 
bartender, county worker and rancher, and recently she’d struggled to 
submit the paperwork. Now she is uninsured.

Work requirements could make it harder to qualify when they take effect in 
2027, just after the 2026 midterms. But Kemp, a lifelong Republican and 
Trump supporter, doesn’t hold that against Trump and suggested he might 
change course. “I really think he’s gonna do something,” she said.

Sitting at his desk across the street — next to a miniature Trump head and 
a small red punching bag labeled “Obama stress reliever” — Curtis Mayor 
Brad Welch called Community Hospital’s comments on federal funding 
“irresponsible.”

“I don’t think the signing of the ‘Big Beautiful Bill’ had one thing to do 
with the closure of this clinic,” Welch said.

Community Hospital officials said they had tried to find another group to 
take over the clinic, without luck. But the city administrator, Andrew 
Lee, was still hopeful. Roberts, the senior center director, wondered if a 
hospital 40 miles to the north could be persuaded.

“Maybe we need to talk to Andrew about really going and schmoozing them 
and trying to get them to come down here,” she told a senior who stopped 
by the counter to get some fried chicken to take home.

“Do something,” the woman echoed. “I mean, it’s really too bad.”


-- 
November 5, 2024 - Congratulations President Donald Trump.  We look 
forward to America being great again.

We live in a time where intelligent people are being silenced so that 
stupid people won't be offended.

Every day is an IQ test. Some pass, some, not so much.

Thank you for cleaning up the disasters of the 2008-2017, 2020-2024 Obama 
/ Biden / Harris fiascos, President Trump.

Under Barack Obama's leadership, the United States of America became the 
The World According To Garp.  Obama sold out heterosexuals for Hollywood 
queer liberal democrat donors.

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A clinic blames its closing on Trump's Medicaid cuts. Patients don't buy it. "Leroy N. Soetoro" <leroysoetoro@americans-first.com> - 2025-07-15 20:15 +0000

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