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“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
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.
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“They’re huge [fans of Trump] … and so it doesn’t matter what he does - there’s an excuse for it,” [registered Republican but non-Trump voter] 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.
Many people in Curtis have directed their frustration at their hospital system instead of their representatives in Washington.
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.
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.
Community Hospital officials said they had tried to find another group to take over the clinic, without luck.
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
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.
--
“They’re huge [fans of Trump] … and so it doesn’t matter what he does - there’s an excuse for it,” [registered Republican but non-Trump voter] 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.
Many people in Curtis have directed their frustration at their hospital system instead of their representatives in Washington.
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.
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.
Community Hospital officials said they had tried to find another group to take over the clinic, without luck.
