Washington, D.C. — Today, the Trump administration announced misleading “rural health investments” in Indiana, conveniently leaving out any mention of the catastrophic health care cuts Donald Trump and Republicans made that have ravaged Indiana’s health care system and left rural communities in the dust. Last year, Donald Trump and Republicans rammed through $1 trillion in cuts to Medicaid to pay for tax breaks for billionaires and big corporations. Indiana alone will lose $20 billion from those Medicaid cuts — making the $120 million CMS announced a pittance by comparison. Also in Indiana, 31 hospitals, clinics, and nursing homes have been forced to shut down, cut services, or are at risk of doing so after the GOP’s cuts. Nationwide, rural hospitals that were already operating on razor-thin margins are struggling to stay afloat.
Rural health care leaders themselves have warned that these funds won’t come close to undoing the damage of $1 trillion in cuts to Medicaid, which were part of the “big ugly bill” Trump and Republicans rammed through last year. Jed Hansen, the executive director of the Nebraska Rural Health Association, said, “[The] Rural Health Transformation will not save a single hospital in our state. I don’t think it will save a single hospital nationally.”
Protect Our Care President Brad Woodhouse issued the following statement:
“Republicans are trying to put a band-aid on a bullet hole after they were the ones to pull the trigger. These are the same people who gutted rural health care funding to give tax breaks for the likes of Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos. They didn’t care about rural health then, and they can’t pretend to care about it now. This is another publicity stunt meant to distract working families from the health care crisis Trump and Republicans in Congress knowingly created. This so-called ‘investment’ is a drop in the bucket compared to the $20 billion Hoosiers are expected to lose in Medicaid funding over the next decade. And that doesn’t even include the funds that clinics and nursing homes are expected to lose. They brought our health care system to the breaking point to line the pockets of their billionaire buddies, and no amount of lying can detract from that.”