Trump is mailing $500 “Obamacare refund” checks to about a million people while the bill he signed last year cut a trillion dollars from Medicaid. Read that again. A trillion. Three hundred and eighty rural hospitals are now at risk of closing, and the guy who killed their funding is sending out rebate checks like a car dealership running a Labor Day sale. The total payout is $500 million. He cut two thousand times that from the program that keeps those hospitals open.
The math is not complicated. The check is a prop. It is a photo op with an envelope. Meanwhile, 40% of rural hospitals are already operating at a loss, and the communities they anchor (housing, jobs, schools, the whole local economy) get three to five years of economic decline after a hospital closes. Your $500 doesn’t cover an ambulance ride to the next town over.