CHARLOTTESVILLE, VA (CVILLE RIGHT NOW) – Advocates, doctors, and impacted Virginians joined Charlottesville State Senator Creigh Deeds at the Northside library discussing how cuts to Medicaid in the bills Congress just passed threatens rural hospitals and rural health care. They said the bill signed July 4 will threaten rural providers, all to fund tax breaks disproportionately benefitting the ultra-wealthy.

Ana Maria Mendez cares for her mother with dementia in Page County. “Them shutting down these rural clinics, I’ll be having to drive 30-to-45 minutes into Harrisonburg or Luray, and those ERs are already slammed”, Mendez said.

Mendez said she saw a reporter ask Republican candidate for Governor, Lt. Governor Winsome Earle-Sears, about how Medicaid cuts affect rural systems, and claimed Sears said not to panic, “Well, guess what, we’re already panicking. We panic when our family members can’t get care. We panic when we make a phone call and can’t talk to a human being. We panic when we have to choose between caregiving and paying our rent.”

Protect Our Care Virginia state director Katie Baker noted a Kaiser Family Foundation analysis that finds rural aeras in Virginia stand to lose $6.8-billion in Medicaid spending over the next ten years, third in the nation behind North Carolina and Kentucky. They claim six Virginia rural hospitals are among 338 nationwide are risk. “If rural hospitals are forced to close, seniors, children, people with disabilities, cancer patients, and people seeking help for substance abuse disorders will lose access to necessary care”, according to Baker.

“We will never stop fighting, we will never stop fighting for our communities”, said state Senator Creigh Deeds (D-Charlottesville).

He said the proudest moment of his long legislative career was the vote he cast when Virginia finally passed Medicaid expansion after a few years of trying. “We’ve worked really hard to reduce the number of uninsured Virginians and we’re at an all-time high of people insured”, Deeds said.

“But we are going to lose more than 100,000 people with insurance”, he concluded.

And he said it’s not just rural provider who stand to lose a lot of money. “Over the next 14 years, VCU and UVA hospitals who are Medicaid providers of last resort, their reimbursement of Medicaid services from the federal government is going to go down from $499-million-a-year to $233-million-a- year.

Charlottesville family physician Dr. Greg Gelburd outlined a scenario where a rural volunteer rescue worker some night gets a call at dinner of a heart attack victim. Gelburd continued that imagine that volunteer puts down their fork and heads to the patient. Perhaps it’s a friend of the volunteer’s, and the nearest provider is a 40-minute drive away.

“While you’re driving with him, you watch his heart rate go down, he goes into arrythmia, and he goes into heart failure. Now I ask you, in the scenario, does he survive?”

“I leave you with that mystery.”