Last year Adam O'Neal, the Republican mayor of Belhaven, North Carolina,
walked nearly 300 miles from Belhaven to Washington, DC, to lobby North Carolina and Virginia lawmakers for rural hospitals and for Medicaid expansion. O'Neal's mission didn't succeed, but that's not stopping him from
retracing those miles this year with a group of 11 activists.
Each mile they walked represents a rural hospital, that, according to a recent report from the Advisory Board Company, is currently at risk of closure without sufficient funding. Their journey took them from North Carolina to the nation’s capital, where the group gathered on Monday morning for a press conference. […]
Even though O'Neal is a Republican, he says that lawmakers need to think carefully about how their positions on Obamacare may be affecting rural hospitals. That’s because failing to expand Obamacare’s optional Medicaid expansion leaves hospitals struggling to remain profitable without an influx of newly insured patients. Rural health care experts have long warned that refusing to accept Medicaid expansion threatens to have negative consequences for their constituency. In addition to closures in North Carolina, multiple rural hospitals have also shuttered in other red states where GOP lawmakers have resisted expanding the public health program—including Texas, Tennessee, Georgia, and Alabama.
That's caused people to die, including an
18-month old toddler in east Texas who choked on a grape and died as her parents drove frantically around trying to find an open emergency room. More and more senseless deaths like that will happen if these hospitals are forced to close.
That's the message O'Neal wants Republican lawmakers in these states to hear. "I'm not a huge Obama fan," he told NPR. "But when you look at Medicaid expansion, you look at the numbers and you look at statistics, it's something that you have to do. If you don't do it, you're penalizing your people pretty harshly."