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The Scramble to Save Rural Health Care From DOGE - The Atlantic

theatlantic.com · 4,715 words · saved by 1 readers

Produced by ElevenLabs and News Over Audio (Noa) using AI narration. Listen to more stories on the Noa app. The clinic was at the end of a craggy parking lot, in the husk of an old Dollar General, and on a morning in March when its future was more tenuous than ever, people were lining up to see a doctor while they still could. A woman worried she was having a relapse of tuberculosis. A man had a mysterious cyst on his neck. An 87-year-old woman hobbled to the check-in desk. “How’re you doing this morning, Ms. Birdie?” the receptionist said to Birdie Nelson. “I’ve had a bad couple days—I’m tired,” said Nelson, giving her phone number. “That’s a landline.” She sat down in the waiting room, beyond which was Perry County, Alabama, an area of roughly 700 square miles with no hospital, one ambulance, and a per capita income of $16,900 a year. People called the clinic Cahaba, which was short for Cahaba Medical Care, a larger system that was managing to get doctors into some of the poorest, si

Listen − 1.0 x + Seek 0:00 29:19 The clinic was at the end of a craggy parking lot, in the husk of an old Dollar General, and on a morning in March when its future was more tenuous than ever, people were lining up to see a doctor while they still could. A woman worried she was having a relapse of tuberculosis. A man had a mysterious cyst on his neck. An 87-year-old woman hobbled to the check-in desk. “How’re you doing this morning, Ms. Birdie?” the receptionist said to Birdie Nelson. “I’ve had a bad couple days—I’m tired,” said Nelson, giving her phone number. “That’s a landline.” She sat down

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