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.
So, if I’m reading this correctly, and the 10 seconds of looking further into it; in 2021 a group called affinity health partners (who from the looks of it are just fucking healthcare vulture capitalists, but I can’t confirm) bought the hospital, then shuttered it because of course they did. And now the locals are complaining that the govt did this to them, and also this article points out how this is bad for Biden? First of all, small towns in eastern NC were never voting for Biden, and more importantly, this isn’t about Biden it is another of example of how private healthcare is fucked in this country. Still drinking my coffee so hopefully that all made sense lol.
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.
Maybe I’m just too naive or optimistic about the state of humanity, but I can’t for the life of me understand how people don’t understand that the real problem is that capitalism glorifies and rewards sociopathic behavior.
Probably preaching to the choir, but I don’t want an economic system built on deprivation and intentional scarcity anywhere resources that are fundamental human rights.
If it weren’t already controlled by the corporations, government’s single most important job should be to keep the greedy fucking billionaires away from healthcare, insurance, Internet access, electricity, etc.
