Time to Hand Out Little White Cards With Prayers

My dad has a story about his early medical practice. He had a patient who had ingested methanol, which causes blindness, and he called an ophthalmologist who had the reputation of being quite good and also a big asshole. Dad asked the guy if there was anything he could do, and the response was “hand out little white cards with prayers on them.” This became dad’s stock response when someone asks him what he did about an obviously hopeless case. So, this:

This is in Don Bacon’s bog-standard Trumper Adrian Smith’s district, and according to some rando on BlueSky, that the county where the clinic is located went for Trump ~70/30. (The clinic is in McCook, Nebraska. I’ve been there. Not a lot going on). So, leopards, faces.

My experience growing up and living in a rural area is that a lot of small towns work really hard to have clinics or hospitals. There's a lot of local boosterism around having a medical facility. Frankly, the larger facilities are often overstaffed. For example, in my home town, the population is down by 1/3, and staff has basically doubled since roughly 30 years ago. It’s easy to get an appointment at short notice. The waiting rooms are rarely full. My dad had a short stay in the hospital a few weeks ago (he’s fine) and the census in the 20 bed hospital was between 1-3. That said, there were times in the recent past when it was the local hospital was full because when the flu hits the olds, they tend to spend time there.

So the loss of rural hospitals is healthcare and more. Though these small hospitals refer most tough cases out, they are important as places that can treat and stabilize things like trauma and heart attacks far more effectively than a paramedic in the back of an ambulance. They’re a major backstop for issues like flu or other epidemics that afflict the elderly, because these rural communities tend to have a higher average age than the bigger towns.

Besides healthcare, the loss of a hospital is the loss of a big employer. More importantly, it’s also the loss of community pride, and the ability of the community to attract new residents. All small towns around here are in decline, and the loss of a medical facility is akin to the loss of a local high school to consolidation with another nearby school. It’s devastating.

The big billionaire blowjob (h/t Betty Cracker) was set up to defer the Medicaid and Medicare cuts, in apparent hopes that the effects of those cuts wouldn’t be felt for a while. The McCook clinic closure shows that this was a miscalculation. A lot of rural facilities are suffering, and the fact that these cuts are coming will be enough to make many of them throw in the towel. They just don’t have many reserves. That said, the Republicans I know around here, who are I’m sure similar to the ones around McCook, all have a cynical worldview based on the obvious decline that surrounds them. This worldview is pseudo-religious and tribal — neither party gives a shit about us, but we’re voting Republican because at least we’re not awful, horrible liberals. My one hope is that someone will tell these people, over and over again, that it was the Republicans who turned healthcare in their small town into handing out little white cards with prayers.