How a North Carolina city's hospital closure could hint at trouble for Joe Biden's campaign
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After one North Carolina city's only hospital closed, residents there say they're not only worried about their health but they've lost trust in politicians

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/15610251

Weeds have punctured through the vacant parking lot of Martin General Hospital’s emergency room. A makeshift blue tarp covering the hospital’s sign is worn down from flapping in the wind. The hospital doors are locked, many in this county of 22,000 fear permanently.

Some residents worry the hospital’s sudden closure last August could cost them their life.

“I know we all have to die, but it seems like since the hospital closed, there’s a lot more people dying,” Linda Gibson, a lifelong resident of Williamston, North Carolina, said on a recent afternoon while preparing snacks for children in a nearby elementary school kitchen.

More than 100 hospitals have downsized services or closed altogether over the past decade in rural communities like Williamston, where people openly wonder if they’d survive the 25-minute ambulance ride to the nearest hospital if they were in a serious car crash.

  • Blackbeard@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
    41·
    6 months ago

    That sounds about right. Interestingly enough, they never even mentioned state lawmakers who needlessly waited over a decade to expand Medicaid, which made hospitals like this more likely to shutter. As a comment in the main thread made clear, this is very much a symptom of how fucked up our healthcare system is in this country, and how it’s likely to get worse before it gets better.

    However, I wanted to dig a bit deeper into the political side of the article’s framing, and I noticed this passage:

    When Quorum Health shut down Martin County’s 43-bed hospital, citing “financial challenges related to declining population and utilization trends,” residents here didn’t just lose a sense of security. They lost trust, too, in the leaders they elected to make their town a better place to live. People like 73-year-old Bobby Woolard say they don’t believe any politicians – from the local county commissioners to the presidential candidates who will pass through this swing state with big campaign promises in the coming months – care enough to help them fix the problem. “If you’re critically ill, there’s no help for you here,” Woolard said on a sunny April afternoon while trimming his neighbor’s hedges. “Nobody seems to care. You got a building sitting there empty and nobody seems to care.”

    I pulled up the voter registration in Williamston that seems to closely align with Mr. Woolard, as the name and address match records on Google. He registered as a Democrat for the first time in 2021. The first time this man ever voted in North Carolina was 11/08/2022. So if he’s 73 years old he was born in 1951, which means he was eligible to vote in 1969. This man spent fifty-three years sitting on the sidelines, and is now bitching that elected officials “don’t seem to care” and (for decades) made decisions about how the US healthcare system should be run, that are now negatively impacting his quality of life.

    It could be that for fifty-three years Mr. Woolard let other people do his voting for him, and the elected representatives paid very close attention to what those people wanted. Seems like a perfect learning opportunity for Mr. Woolard to admit sitting on the sidelines is a terrible way to get what you want out of your elected representatives.