| The Washington Post is spotlighting how Jen Kiggans’ historic health care cuts are turning voters against her as costs continue to rise and hospitals are at risk of closure.
Kiggans voted for Medicaid cuts that “could pull the rug out from the local hospital” in her district and “push [it] over the edge.”
Speaking at a health care round table in Franklin, a retired physician criticized Kiggans’ cuts and said that “we need to rid ourselves of this leadership that’s taking us backwards.” Another Virginian said that “we’re all very concerned” about the possibility that the local hospital could shutter, dealing an economic blow to the community.
Read more highlights from The Washington Post:
- Here in one of the most competitive House districts in the country, health care is an urgent part of the affordability topic driving political campaigns everywhere ahead of this fall’s midterm elections.
- Shutting the Bon Secours Southampton Medical Center would be a serious economic blow to this former paper mill town whose main employer closed years ago.
- Democrat Elaine Luria is trying to win back the House seat she once held by reminding residents that President Donald Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” will enact Medicaid cuts that could force the hospital out.
- “What’s even more scary is people might not actually recognize what’s coming,” Luria said in an interview, promising to work to reverse Medicaid changes that Virginia officials have said could cost some $2 billion a year.
- The $189 million… [a rural health] fund provides Virginia this year for rural hospitals is significantly less than the cuts that state officials say create problems for the industry, including about $2 billion a year in Medicaid reductions beginning in 2028 and the loss of subsidies for health insurance through the Affordable Care Act that caused as many as 90,000 Virginians to drop insurance this year.
- “We need to rid ourselves of this leadership that’s taking us backwards,” Alvin Harris, a retired physician, told Luria at a health care roundtable last month in Franklin, urging her to go to Washington and make changes.
- “We’re all very concerned” about the prospect of the hospital shutting down after serving the community for generations, said Susan Jones, 57, whose family has owned a downtown office supply shop more than 50 years. “Most of us here in town have no idea why, or what the problem is.”
- Over the summer, a report from Virginia’s bipartisan Joint Commission on Health Care identified five rural hospitals across the state at imminent risk of closure, including Franklin’s Bon Secours Southampton Medical Center. It said looming Medicaid cuts — which would both reduce the number of patients seeking care and slash payments to hospitals — could push them over the edge.
- Bon Secours, the nonprofit that bought the Franklin hospital in 2020, said that the challenges facing such facilities are not new. “In recent years, however, those headwinds have intensified,” the nonprofit said in a statement.
- For many services, residents have to travel about 40 minutes farther to a hospital in the city of Suffolk.
- The looming Medicaid cuts that could pull the rug out from the local hospital will disproportionately affect Black residents, according to Rodrigo Soto of the Commonwealth Institute for Fiscal Analysis, a left-leaning think tank in Richmond. About 34 percent of Virginia’s Medicaid enrollees are Black, nearly double the proportion of African Americans in the state’s overall population, at 18 percent.
- Because of the scope of federal cuts to Medicaid, the ACA and low-income food assistance, the roughly $189 million coming to Virginia this year from the Big Beautiful Bill is not enough to close the gap in aid to vulnerable populations, said Lauryn Walker, the state’s deputy secretary of Health and Human Resources.
- Yvonne Rose, 76, an elder at Majette’s New Life church, said the looming cuts will be a serious blow to low-income families. “And we’re pretty much a population of poor people out here,” she said.
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