I don't know the answer to that question, but that is the conclusion suggested by two stories in the mainstream media today.
First, Hannah Knowles reports from Curtis, Nebraska, for the Washington Post under the headline, "A clinic blames its closing on Trump’s Medicaid cuts. Patients don’t buy it." That headline sums up the gist of the story--and the reason why Medicaid cuts won't have the political impact on rural Trump voters that Democrats are hoping for.
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.
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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.
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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.
Here are key--and colorful--quotes from two different Curtis residents:
“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.
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.
Much more detailed re the consequences of the Medicaid cuts for rural hospitals is this episode of the New York Times "The Daily" headlined, "One Rural Doctor on the Real Costs of Medicaid Changes." Natalie Kitroeff interviews that doctor, Shannon Dowler. The story is a very detailed one of how North Carolina eventually came to expand Medicaid, providing health care to many folks who otherwise would not have had access to it. Many rural characters--you could say stereotypes--are depicted in this story--most of them, I am assuming based on the western North Carolina locale, are white.
It's only at the end of the half hour interview when you get to the reasons, according to Dr. Dowler, that residents don't or won't blame Trump for their loss of health care. Here's the exchange between Kitroeff and Dr. Dowler:
Kitroeff:
Do you think that your patients, for example, will blame the lawmakers who voted for this bill?
Dowler:
No.
Kitroeff:
Why not?
Dowler
There’s just not enough of a direct correlation to people’s health care needs in the moment and what happened in DC 12 months before, 18 months before.natalie kitroeff
So you think there is a chance that the folks who voted for the people who voted for the bill that leads to them potentially losing coverage will not be seeing that those people are really responsible.shannon dowler
No. I had a patient come in the day after the election. And he said, it’s about time. We’ve got to get government out of health care. Well, ironically, he has Medicare. And he just
Kitroeff:
Wow,
Dowler:
— doesn’t get it. And so this is not uncommon. This is a super complex system of health care. I was at Medicaid for five years. Every day, I learned something new around how Medicaid worked. It’s very, very complex. I’m not surprised that patients don’t understand all of this.
Kitroeff:
I’m wondering if you think they will blame anyone for the loss in care. And if so, who would get the blame?
Dowler:
It’s hard to know. I think people often would get mad at the hospitals because the hospitals weren’t providing them some service that they felt they were due, not understanding how complex the system of health care is. So I just don’t think based on what I saw before, I don’t think the lawmakers are the ones that are necessarily going to bear the brunt of this, especially with the timeline where they have this stuff rolling out after the midterm elections.
This all reminds me of some of the reasons folks gave for not taking the Covid vaccine back in 2021, even as they came close to dying from the disease. They nevertheless said that if they survived the disease, they still would not be vaccinated.
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