Trump's assault on rural hospitals hits the Senate

Appreciate this story and independent reporting? Leave us a tip.

One of the dirtiest secrets of the MAGA Murder Budget that Donald Trump would like you to call the One Big, Beautiful Bill is that it’s a death warrant for hundreds of rural hospitals. Because if you want to punish Trump voters, you always have to get in line behind Trump and his Republicans.

Senate Republicans will offer their slight edits to the bill this week, which will likely do little to change the bulk of this extraordinarily unpopular assault on the good our government does.

338 rural hospitals at risk

But the depths of how bad this bill are so deep and murky that there has been almost no exploration of one of the law’s most vicious effects—the starving of rural hospitals that are already teetering on the edge of solvency.

A recent study by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, requested by Senate Democrats, finds that the bill threatens 338 rural hospitals and practically dooms 83 of them to imminent closure. You can click the link to see a breakdown by state and the exact names of the hospitals Republicans will be voting to doom.

If you’ve heard about this unnecessary war on rural America’s healthcare, you are an excellent news hound. Or you’ve come across one of the few headlines that call it out, but in an embarrassing fashion, like this one from The Washington Post last week:

The headline literally adopts GOP framing from the mouth of Senator Ron Johnson—the GOP’s most tested and popular framing!—to justify the closure of hospitals that Trump voters in red areas depend on to keep their families alive.

Putting this all in DOGE-like financial terms is the intention—exemplified by choosing the word “afloat” over “alive”—exemplifies how Republicans want this debate to be about the canard of “waste, fraud, and abuse” when the reality here is the goal is to loot the poorest Americans, many of whom live in the reddest states, to send the money to richest Americans, many of whom live in the bluest parts of the US.

The Post could have avoided the GOP’s framing on a budget mechanism, which has been used since 1992 to get more money to the hospitals that needed it most, and instead gone with a headline that quoted another GOP Senator, Josh Hawley, like:

GOP attack on rural hospitals is a ‘benefit cut’

That would be an easy pull from this section:

If rural hospitals close, what’s the difference between that and a benefit cut?” he said.

Hawley said he’s heard from numerous rural hospitals that are worried their funding will dry up if the provider tax gets capped. Just under half of his state’s hospitals are in rural counties. Rural areas are also more likely to have a disproportionate number of Medicaid participants, with 23.8 percent of rural Missourians enrolled in Medicaid and 24.4 percent of rural Americans, according to an analysis by Washington University in St. Louis. Financial problems are a leading cause of a rural hospital shortage around the country, with roughly half nationwide operating in the red.

That headline is just as strong as what the Post went with and motivates people against the bill. But alas, the billionaire Trump sycophant who owns the post is showing the value of trickle-down economics in manufacturing consent.

Who will defend Red America from Trump?

So, here we are, weeks from the biggest transfer of wealth from the poorest Americans to the wealthiest Americans, and the only people covering the harm Trump wants to do poor and red America are sources like The Bulwark, LOLGOP, and the American Prospect.

The Prospect’s David Dayen looks at a study from the Institute for Macroeconomic & Policy Analysis (IMPA) and finds:

“From a macroeconomic perspective, the OBBB fails on every front: It increases the deficit, weakens the social safety net, and raises inequality, without delivering credible economic gains,” a summary of their report reads.

And this is before you get to the fact that this bill will kill an estimated 51,000 people a year, and cause 10.9 million to lose their health insurance. (Another 5.1 million will lose health insurance from failing to maintain expanded premium support on the Affordable Care Act exchanges.)

Plus, if you add in the effect of across-the-board tariffs, the bottom 80 percent of the income distribution lose money from Trump’s policies, and only the top 20 percent gain. Adding the Big Beautiful Bill to tariffs and you’re talking about a net 6.6 percent cut to household bottom lines for the bottom 10 percent.

if you add in the effect of across-the-board tariffs, the bottom 80 percent of the income distribution lose money from Trump’s policies, and only the top 20 percent gain. Adding the Big Beautiful Bill to tariffs and you’re talking about a net 6.6 percent cut to household bottom lines for the bottom 10 percent.

Killing almost as many Americans as the Vietnam War for the cause of widening America’s chronic wealth inequality crisis (and, of course, climate change, as the bill is designed to cut off the green energy revolution that is America’s most tremendous governmental success of the century).

You could even argue—and I will!—that part of Trump’s desire to invade our great cities and terrorize our neighbors there is to pull attention from how he’s immiserating the red areas that supported him most in all three of his presidential runs.

How many disasters can one disaster invite?

What if Trump and the GOP had succeeded with their plan to gut Medicaid in 2017? How many more would have died in the pandemic?

This was a thought experiment I used to play with myself back when I thought we’d lucked out.

Unfortunately, now, with these cuts promised and Typhoid Bobby doing all he can to make sure we get another pandemic and have no vaccines to fight it, we’re bound to get the answer.

But there’s still hope

Dayen notes that this bill “doesn’t even have widespread support among Republican voters. The changes that the Senate is doing will clearly extend the timeline on the bill, as Sens. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and John Curtis (R-UT) have intimated. There’s no way this thing is done by July 4, which means that Republicans will be saddled with this unpopular albatross for weeks to come. That hasn’t yet dislodged a critical mass of them from supporting the package. But every day raises that opportunity.”

Joni Ernst helped clarify the life-and-death stakes of this budget.

Now it’s our job to take advantage of the delay.

Indivisible has a great rundown of the best steps we can take, and 

Rogan's List has a definitive collection of actions to Take Down the MAGA Murder Budget.

Appreciate this story and independent reporting? Leave us a tip.

Subscribe to LOLGOP's THE FARCE—free or paid, your support matters.