The Williamson Memorial Hospital, in the small, coal-mining community of Williamson, West Virginia, which is the seat of Mingo County, closed its doors in April of 2020. The closure left the rural, mountainous county, with a population of 24,000, without a hospital or emergency room. There is one across the Tug River, in Kentucky, at the Appalachian Regional Hospital, but there are complications with crossing a state line when it comes to insurance, especially medicaid benefits and the closure of the hospital on the West Virginia side has led to overcrowding at Appalachian Regional's emergency room.
And Mingo County is not a place where everyone has transportation. With the nearest ER in West Virginia 30 miles, and 45 minutes away, in Logan County, the closure of Williamson's hospital created major hardships.
However, thanks to one of the local physicians, Dr. Dino Beckett, and the Biden Administration, the effort to re-open Williamson Memorial Hospital received a $2 million boost in federal funding. According to the Mountain Citizen, the hospital is in the process of re-opening in phases, starting with internal medicine and podiatry, which opened in 2023. Radiology, the ER, ancillary departments and then 18 patient rooms on the surgical floor will follow in the summer of 2024. The openings will take place over the course of the rest of the year, with the goal of having it fully operational by the end of the year.
Even though the facility had been a hospital prior to its closure in April of 2022, it took $16 million invested in it by the Williamson Health and Wellness Center practice of Dr. Dino Beckett, along with multiple sources of financing, to renovate the facility, purchase equipment and get it going again. This includes the $2 million kicked in by the Biden Administration.
Rural Hospitals are Vital to American Healthcare and Keeping Them Open Should be a Priority
As a result of its location, and the local economy, the majority of the people served by a rural hospital like this one are also dependent on some kind of federal assistance to provide their medical care. A high percentage of the population in this rural, coal mining region are now dependent on medicaid, or on insurance secured through the Affordable Care Act. A Trump presidency would endanger their ability to pay for any medical care they receive and could endanger the operation of the hospital once again.
Most people take their local hospital for granted. Now, people in this rural West Virginia county know what it is like to be without one, and they also know what it takes to put one back together and keep it operational. The question is whether this issue is important enough to them to look at their politics and see if making sure a presidential administration that cares about their health care, and their community, enough to invest in it, is worth keeping in the White House.
I wouldn't bet on that.
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