Image: Nevada Senator Catherine Cortez Masto, photo by Gage Skidmore, Wikimedia Commons
At the beginning of this month, President Trump and Republicans in Congress overcame bipartisan opposition to pass legislation that will provide massive tax relief to the wealthiest Americans while stripping benefits from those that need them the most.
I voted against this cruel bill for many reasons. First, it gives tax cuts to billionaires while raising costs on working families. And it will add $4 trillion to the national debt, jeopardize 21,000 clean-energy jobs in Nevada, and threaten 40 million Americans with food insecurity. But one especially damaging element of this law is the threat it poses to our rural hospitals.
The Republican law will kick 17 million Americans off of health insurance, including over 114,000 Nevadans, and cut $930 billion in Medicaid funding. Rural hospitals serve a higher percentage of Medicaid recipients than their urban counterparts, so they will be hit especially hard by these cuts, forcing them to close departments or even shut down.
I know that so many Tribal members in Nevada and across the country live in rural areas and rely on small-town hospitals and clinics for their health care. And while Republicans claim that they have offset the problem of rural hospital closures because they created a rural hospital relief fund in the bill, make no mistake: their $50 billion fund over five years is a pitiful attempt to fix the problems created by cutting $930 billion from Medicaid.
While Republicans have already passed this atrocious law, the fight is not over. I will continue to push for legislation like my bipartisan Protecting Access to Ground Ambulance Medical Services Act, which would ensure that rural communities have access to ground ambulance services, and my Indian Health Services (IHS) Workforce Parity Act, which would make it easier for the IHS to recruit and retain medical workers. I’ll keep fighting for rural and Tribal hospitals to ensure all Nevadans have access to the care they need.
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