Exactly two months after President Donald Trump signed his policy megabill in a July 4 celebration at the White House, a Virginia health care company blamed the law for the closure of three rural clinics serving communities along the Blue Ridge Mountains.
The closures, Augusta Medical Group said in its statement, were part of the company’s “ongoing response to the One Big Beautiful Bill Act and the resulting realities for healthcare delivery.”
Rural health providers that rely on Medicaid funding were already under strain before the bill cut federal health spending by hundreds of billions of dollars over the next decade. Now, Democrats are linking that crisis to Trump and Republicans in elections this year and next.
Democratic gubernatorial nominee Abigail Spanberger recently campaigned in Buena Vista, a 6,600-person town that is losing its clinic, as she tries to improve her party’s standing with rural voters ahead of this fall’s election. Candidates for governor, potentially faced with the job of navigating the cuts, have been among the most vocal about the threats to rural health care, including Keisha Lance Bottoms in Georgia, Rob Sand in Iowa, Gov. Kathy Hochul of New York and former Biden administration Interior Secretary Deb Haaland in New Mexico.
“Rural hospitals are closing, at the end of the day. We’re seeing the tip of the iceberg here in Virginia, and it’s a sign of what’s to come,” said Marshall Cohen, a veteran Democratic strategist at the political firm KMM Strategies.
Ken Nunnenkamp, executive director of the Virginia GOP, pushed back on criticism of the Augusta Health closures in a statement to CNN. Augusta Health, which declined to comment beyond its statement, noted in its announcement that patients at two of the clinics could be reassigned to other facilities less than 10 miles away and that it would use a mobile clinic to serve people affected by the third closure.
“If two health clinics consolidate in order to provide better, more consistent, and more accessible service to the patients from both locations, that is a win for rural communities,” Nunnenkamp said in a statement.
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