“The Big, Beautiful Bill was a dirty, rotten deal,” said Perry County nurse Rachel Parks (pictured), at a public event in Whitesburg, Ky. last month. “What those politicians who supported the bill did was cold-hearted," she went on. "They knew that the bill would throw millions of people off healthcare, especially here in Appalachia. They signed it into law anyway. As a result, rural hospitals will close, and that includes pretty much every hospital here in Eastern Kentucky, and many in West Virginia.” Parks, who works at the ARH (formally known as Appalachian Regional Healthcare) location in Hazard, Ky.—and is the Chief Union Representative there for the union National Nurses United—was one of several nurses from ARH clinics and hospitals across the region who gathered at James Wiley Craft Park in Whitesburg on February 19th, to voice their concerns about the so-called “Big, Beautiful Bill,” which was championed by the Trump Administration, and passed by the Republican majorities in Congress last year. The nurses’ worries primarily lay in the bill’s cuts to federal social programs that affect Appalachian healthcare. In order to pay for a $4+ trillion set of tax cuts (nearly half of which, according to the non-partisan Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, will go to just the top 5% of US households), the Trump-backed bill makes sweeping cuts to programs like SNAP and Medicaid. In particular, the bill cuts Medicaid funding by nearly $1 trillion over the next decade. For their part, the Trump Administration says these cuts are aimed at getting rid of "waste, fraud, and abuse." All in all, some 7 1/2 million people nationwide are expected to lose access to Medicaid as a result of the bill, according to the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office. And these cuts are poised to not only affect low-income people in our region who rely on Medicaid for healthcare— Medicaid reimbursements are also a significant part of local hospitals’ bottom line. In fact, according to the Kentucky Center for Economic Policy, some 35 Kentucky hospitals—and many of them here in the mountains—are now at risk of closing because of the Big Beautiful Bill’s cuts to Medicaid, including local ARH hospitals in Whitesburg, McDowell, Harlan, Prestonsburg, and south Williamson, among others. And so last month, this group of unionized ARH nurses, from Whitesburg, Hazard, and beyond, spoke about what they see as the dangers of these cuts, to local healthcare and to the local economy, and they also shared their thoughts about how cuts to programs like Medicaid have come even as other federal agencies, like ICE, received massive funding increases this year. And in this edition of Mountain Talk, we begin our show with a selection of their comments. Then, we stay on the topic of local people organizing for better healthcare outcomes, to hear a story from the WMMT archives about local healthcare during the War on Poverty, including the trailblazing work of the tireless, and hugely influential, local health advocate Eula Hall. And then, in the second half of the show, in honor of Women’s History Month, we hear an installment from the former WMMT series Southern Songbirds: a biographical portrait of Letcher County’s own Martha Carson, a pioneering figure in country music. (Music this week comes from Malcolm Dalglish & Grey Larsen, from the June Appal Records release "Banish Misfortune"; from Glenn Jones & Laura Baird, and from Don Bikoff, both from the Free Music Archive.)
