During the Call, Protect Our Care Released a New Report and Interactive Website Detailing How GOP Medicaid Cuts Are Pushing Hospitals and Clinics to the Brink
Visit the Interactive Website Here.
Washington, D.C. – Today, Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT), health care leaders, and advocates joined Protect Our Care to expose the damage of Republican Medicaid cuts on hospitals, clinics, and essential providers nationwide. During the call, Protect Our Care released a report and interactive website outlining how more than 1,000 hospitals, clinics, and essential providers have closed, are at risk of closure, or have cut essential services since Republicans’ sweeping health care cuts last July.
Nearly one year ago, Donald Trump and congressional Republicans gutted over $1 trillion from Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act to fund tax breaks for billionaires and big corporations. Since then, communities across the country have been paying the price. Working Americans are being forced to travel farther for care, only to face longer wait times and overcrowded emergency rooms. Expectant mothers are being thrown into maternal care deserts. Rural towns that rely on health care jobs to keep people employed are being decimated by layoffs, cuts and closures. Speakers warned that this is only the beginning. They explained how Republicans’ cuts have ravaged our health care system, putting care further out of reach for millions, and forcing providers to make impossible choices.
“Republicans decided to cut Medicaid by around a trillion dollars — the only reason they did that was to pass along tax cuts for their billionaire and corporate friends — and the first impact of that is that people lose coverage,” said Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT). “When fewer people have insurance, and when the rates are lowered, health care institutions, hospital wards, hospitals, clinics, and nursing homes are going to close their doors. Your community hospital, the nursing home that you send your mother to, the maternity ward you’re planning to deliver your baby at, they are closing at an alarming rate, and that’s the consequence of the decision that Republicans made.”
“When we talk about time and emergency medicine, time is everything,” said Dr. Chris Ford, an emergency medicine physician from Milwaukee, Wisconsin. “It’s the difference between recovery and disability, between a patient surviving and a patient dying. When a hospital closes, these emergencies don’t stop; the heart attacks don’t stop; the strokes don’t stop. The patients are still there, but they have to travel farther, and they have fewer places to go. That’s the reality of what we’re dealing with. If these cuts continue, patients will continue to pay the price, and not just in dollars, but in delayed care, preventable suffering, and lives lost.”
“When hospitals close or make cuts, we all suffer, whether we’re on Medicaid or not,” Dr. Eve Krief, pediatrician from Long Island, New York and Vice President & Legislative Advocacy Co-Chair of the Long Island, Queens, and Brooklyn American Academy of Pediatrics. “They’re not going to be able to provide the services or the care that we all rely on, whatever insurance we have. They’re going to be cutting their psychiatric services, mental health care, and substance abuse services that our families need. Then, they’re going to be cutting staffing, so we’re going to have longer waits in the ERs; we’re not going to have the specialists there. They’ve also had their research funding cuts. So hospitals are really struggling without all kinds of funding sources that they had before, and all our families are suffering.”
“Proximity to care is not a convenience; it is the difference between life and death,” said Callie Harper, health care advocate from Savannah, Georgia. “My daughter spent three months in the NICU, and she had a brain bleed, a lung disorder, and a vision disorder directly due to our delays in care and her prematurity. She’s now a thriving two-year-old, and I know exactly how close we came to a completely different story. Had I been 30, 45, or 90 minutes from a hospital instead of down the road, she likely would not have survived. When you gut Medicaid, you don’t just cut an insurance program; you close the only door a woman can reach in the dark. I have been that woman driving through a storm, calculating distance, literally fighting for my life and my baby’s life, and the luck of geography, of insurance, of timing, should not determine whether a woman and her baby survive.”
“Behind each pin is a story,” said Anne Shoup, Protect Our Care, Senior Advisor. “Whether it’s an expectant mother losing access to prenatal care after the nearest rural hospital was forced to close its maternity ward, or seniors driving hours each way for care that used to be down the road, or people with disabilities facing gaps in caregiving that allow them to stay in their own homes, these pins represent our neighbors, our parents, and our kids. They deserve better than to have their health care gutted to write a check to the ultra-wealthy.”