Republicans’ Latest Gambit to Deny Rural Veterans Health Care
In the windswept plains and rolling hills of northeastern North Dakota, Ramsey County is home to approximately 560 U.S. military veterans. Stutsman County, located to the south, has roughly 1,500 veterans. Both counties share something else in common: each has a federally designated Critical Access Hospital (CAH)—CHI St. Alexius Health in Ramsey County’s Devils Lake, and the Jamestown Regional Medical Center in Stutsman County’s Jamestown.
To qualify as one of America’s 1,337 Critical Access Hospitals, such a facility must be located at least 35 miles from the nearest hospital (or 15 miles in mountainous terrain), maintain an emergency room, and house up to 25 beds with patients staying an average of 96 hours or less. This special designation, established in 1997, helps hospitals achieve greater financially stability and offers rural Americans a lifeline by maintaining essential health care.
These lifelines are now in danger of closing or drastically reducing their services, due to President Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” (OBBBA). The bill slashes $911 billion in Medicaid funding over the next decade, potentially leaving entire communities stranded. According the Kaiser Family Foundation, rural areas stand to lose $87 billion, even after accounting for the $50 billion supplemental “Rural Health Transformation Fund” embedded in the legislation.
Instead of fixing a problem of their own making, leaders in Congress are now using Critical Access Hospitals as a red herring to siphon public funding away from veterans’ health care.
Two Republican Senators who sit on the Senate Committee on Veterans’ Affairs—Kevin Cramer of North Dakota and Tim Sheehy of Montana—have rightfully expressed concerns about the fragility of rural health care. To address the crisis, they have introduced the “Critical Access for Veterans Care Act,” legislation they claim will help rescue the nation’s rural hospitals and clinics. In their press releaseannouncing the bill, they state: “As a country, we have prioritized the preservation of Critical Access Hospitals to ensure rural America has readily available care.”
Unfortunately, their proposed solution will likely do far more harm than good.
In a new piece for Barn Raiser, VHPI Senior Policy Analysts Suzanne Gordon and Russell Lemle survey the landscape of rural healthcare in America and detail how Congressional efforts billed as vital for rural veterans will, in fact, undermine their access.
Read the full piece here.