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.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
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.
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.
The sentiment in this sharply polarized and segregated eastern North Carolina county could hint at trouble for President Joe Biden, who has made health care a key part of his reelection campaign against Republican rival Donald Trump.
And in North Carolina, the campaign is narrowly focused on promoting Democrats’ successful efforts to expand Medicaid, which will extend nearly-free government health insurance to thousands of people and reduce the indigent population for hospitals.
“Health care is on the ballot this year, and voters will remember that when they reject Donald Trump in November,” said Dory MacMillan, the Biden campaign’s North Carolina communications director.
But with that money spent, hospital closures might tick up again, said George Pink, the deputy director of the University of North Carolina’s Sheps Center’s Rural Health Research Program.
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