A clinic blames its closing on Trump's Medicaid cuts. Patients don't buy it. [View all]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/07/13/trump-tax-bill-medicaid-rural/

A clinic blames its closing on Trump’s Medicaid cuts. Patients don’t buy it.
A clinic in rural Nebraska has become a political flash point after tying its looming closure to Trump’s law cutting Medicaid.
July 13, 2025 at 5:00 a.m. EDT
By Hannah Knowles

CURTIS, Nebraska — The only health clinic here is shutting down, and the hospital CEO has blamed Medicaid cuts in President Donald Trump’s signature legislation. But residents of Curtis — a one-stoplight town in deep-red farm country — aren’t buying that explanation.

“Anyone who’s saying that Medicaid cuts is why they’re closing is a liar,” April Roberts said, as she oversaw lunch at the Curtis Area Senior Center.

The retirees trickling in for fried chicken and soft-serve ice cream will be hit hardest when the clinic closes this fall, Roberts fears. Seniors who sometimes go in multiple times a month to have blood drawn will have to drive 40 miles to the next nearest health center. Sick people, she worries, will put off checkups and get sicker.

Arriving for lunch, retired Navy veteran Jim Christensen said he’d read an op-ed that “tried to blame everything on Trump.”

“Horse feathers,” he said, dismissing the idea.

Curtis has become an early test case of the politics of Trump’s agenda in rural America, where voters vulnerable to Medicaid cuts in Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” law are reluctant to blame the president or congressional Republicans who approved it. Many people in Curtis have directed their frustration at their hospital system instead of their representatives in Washington.

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