Disaster-Worn Mansfield, Louisiana, Needs a Modernized Hospital. The Big Beautiful Bill Could Ruin Its Plans.

Around 2:30 p.m. Monday afternoon, Senator Edward Markey, Democrat of Massachusetts, proposed an amendment that would have protected some 300 rural hospitals from the cuts present in the Big Plug Ugly. The Republican majority voted the amendment down. Interestingly, however, one of the hospital systems Markey’s amendment sought to rescue was the DeSoto Regional Health Service in Mansfield, Louisiana, a city a little to the west of Shreveport.

Mansfield has less than 5,000 people and is the parish seat of DeSoto County. It is 83 percent Black. A year ago, five tornadoes ripped through the area when Hurricane Beryl came ashore. The DeSoto Regional Health Service oversees the parish’s hospital, which was built in 1952. In 2023, the system borrowed $36 million to modernize the facility.

They got the money because the lending institutions were confident that the system’s primary funding source, Medicaid, was going to stay reliable as the loans were repaid. After all, almost 300,000 people in the congressional district of which DeSoto parish is located are dependent on Medicaid for their health coverage, and 118,000 of them came into Medicaid via the Affordable Care Act. So the health system applied for the loan, and the lenders felt safe in handing over the $36 million.

Called that one a little early, I guess. From a report by KFF Health News:

DeSoto CEO Todd Eppler said Medicaid cuts could make it harder for his hospital to repay the loans and for patients to access care. “I just hope that the people who are making these decisions have thought deeply about it and have some context of the real-world implications,” he said, “because it’s going to affect us as a hospital and going to affect our patients.”

Among them is Chloe Stovall, 23, who works in the produce aisle at the SuperValu grocery store in Vivian, Louisiana. She said her take-home wage working full time is $200 a week. She doesn’t own a car and walks a mile to work. The store provides health coverage, but she said she won’t qualify until she’s worked there for a full year—and even then, it will cost more than Medicaid, which is free. “I’m just barely surviving,” she said.

Senator Markey’s amendment would have alleviated a lot of the concerns of the DeSoto Regional Health System, which was thrown into uncertainty by the version of the Big Plug Ugly that came creeping out of the House of Representatives, an uncertainty that became more profound in the version promulgated by the Senate.

The interesting thing is that DeSoto Parish happens to be in the congressional district represented by Speaker of the House Mike Johnson. It may occur to some voters why a senator from the Godless people’s republic of Massachusetts cares more about their good health than does their own God-bothering congressman. Speaker Moses is going to leave his people wandering in a health-care desert without even a rock to strike for water.