Richmond, Virginia— Since 2005, two rural hospitals serving primarily Medicaid and Medicare patients in Lee and Patrick counties have closed due to financial difficulty. A new study suggests that if the cuts to Medicaid in the budget reconciliation bill recently passed by the House go through, eight more rural hospitals (about 26% of rural hospitals) are at immediate risk of closure. This would leave residents of large portions of the state without any access to hospital services. These areas of the state are already critically underserved for health care–20 of Virginia’s 29 rural hospitals do not offer any maternity, labor and delivery or postpartum care, for example. Closing the hospitals would leave many people in a position where they could not access any health care services at all within a hundred miles. If the cuts to Medicaid go through, virtually every hospital west of Roanoke would close.
In Virginia, patients who use Medicaid as their primary form of health insurance tend to be disproportionately concentrated in small towns and rural communities. Forty percent of children in small towns and rural areas were covered by Medicaid/CHIP, and almost 20 percent of adults younger than 65 in small towns and rural areas were enrolled in Medicaid in 2023. As such, Medicaid reimbursements help keep rural hospitals afloat, and even without the upcoming cuts, many Medicaid-dependent hospitals are barely making ends meet.
“The cuts to Medicaid that Republican lawmakers are hellbent on pushing through Congress are nothing short of an all-out assault on rural Virginians and working families across the Commonwealth,” said LaTwyla Mathias, Executive Director of Progress Virginia. “If Republicans succeed in slashing Medicaid, we’ll lose almost a third of our rural hospitals, leaving entire regions with no access to emergency care, or even basic health services. Let’s be clear: this isn’t budget tightening—it’s a death sentence for communities that are already hanging on by a thread. Lawmakers pushing this heartless agenda should have to look a mother in Tazewell in the eye and explain why she’ll have to drive 100 miles to deliver her baby, get her child’s broken arm set, or get chemotherapy. This is cruel and dangerous, and we will not stand for it.”
Background:
- Virginians rely heavily on Medicaid: about 35% of the population uses it as their sole or primary health insurance.
- More than 1 in 3 births are covered by the program, and close to half of Virginia children are Medicaid-eligible.
- Those numbers rise dramatically in rural areas of the Commonwealth, and some of the highest percentages of Medicaid recipients live in Southside Virginia, an area that has already been hit hard by rising costs and other federal cuts.