AJC: “Just months after the bill passed, and years before the most drastic cuts are scheduled to go into effect, the looming changes are already being felt by entire rural communities, whether patients there are on Medicaid or not.”
A new column from the AJC underscores how the sweeping Medicaid cuts included in Trump’s unpopular budget law are causing far-reaching damage to rural hospitals across the state.
Last week, the AJC reported in detail on how St. Mary’s Sacred Heart Hospital – which is located in GOP U.S. Senate candidate Mike Collins’ district – recently announced that it will be closing its labor and delivery unit in Lavonia next month. According to a hospital spokesperson, “anticipated cuts to federal assistance forced the hospital’s hand” in making their decision.
In August, Evans Memorial Hospital, a rural hospital in Georgia, announced that it may have to cut its ICU as a result of Trump’s budget law.
“MAGA warrior” Buddy Carter, MAGA extremist Mike Collins, and failed and fired former Tennessee football coach Derek Dooley have all stood by Donald Trump’s harmful budget law even as Georgians are left feeling the devastating impacts to their health care.
Read for yourself:
AJC: Looming Medicaid cuts bring early political peril for Republicans
Patricia Murphy | September 24, 2025
- To hear Republicans tell it in the spring, the only people who would notice the $1 trillion cut to Medicaid in President Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” were fraudsters, grifters and cheats.
- “They’re looking at waste, fraud and abuse. But we’re not cutting Medicaid,” Trump told “Meet the Press” in May as Congress debated the bill.
- By July, congressional Republicans passed deep cuts to Medicaid, food stamps, and other safety net programs to pay for tax cuts…
- U.S. Rep. Buddy Carter, the Republican from Pooler who chaired the House subcommittee that recommended the health care cuts, had the same message in an interview with “Politically Georgia” as he kicked off his Senate campaign in the spring.
- Not only did Carter support the Medicaid cuts in the bill — he said he would have liked to see the cuts go deeper in the program that covers half of all births, 70% of nursing home patients and 2 in 5 children in Georgia.
- But just months after the bill passed, and years before the most drastic cuts are scheduled to go into effect, the looming changes are already being felt by entire rural communities, whether patients there are on Medicaid or not.
- That’s because rural hospitals in Georgia say the federal health care spending cuts in the bill, along with scheduled cuts to Affordable Care Act subsidies, are forcing them to make difficult choices now they never wanted to contemplate.
- Those choices are affecting all of the patients they serve, no matter what kind of insurance they are on, as hospitals evaluate cutting local services or closing altogether.
- The first Georgia hospital to announce a significant budget shortfall was Evans Memorial Hospital in Claxton.
- But CEO Bill Lee said Evans Memorial expects cuts to federal spending will leave the hospital with a $3.3 million hole in its budget in 2026. The most likely place to start to make up the difference would be cuts to its new intensive care unit.
- “Survivability” was the same goal at St. Mary’s Sacred Heart Hospital in Lavonia when it announced two weeks ago that it will close its labor and delivery unit by the end of October.
- Among several reasons the hospital pointed to for its decision were the congressional cuts to Medicaid.
- Along with the Mother-Baby unit at the hospital, St. Mary’s said it will also discontinue its local OB-GYN services and transfer them all to Athens, about a 45-minute drive away.
- The changes don’t just mean doctor appointments will be harder for pregnant women to get to. A local pregnancy center staffer told the AJC’s Michelle Baruchman they’re afraid of what it will mean for women’s health and safety without a labor and delivery unit in the area at all.
- “Our fear is there’s going to be highway deliveries. There’s going to be women on the side of the road having babies and no prenatal care.”
- St. Mary’s Hospital sits in U.S. Rep. Mike Collins’ district. Like Carter and all of the Republicans in Georgia’s House delegation, Collins voted for the “big, beautiful bill” too…
- But who uses an intensive care unit in Evans County more than older adults and people with disabilities? And who relies on a labor and delivery department in rural Franklin County other than women and babies?
- No matter what kind of health insurance people in those counties have, their access to critical services in their communities could be gone for good.
- But at the moment, it looks like the most fraud, waste and abuse that the “big, beautiful bill” has revealed is the sales job that came with passing it in the first place.