Martin General Hospital’s abrupt closure in 2023 left Martin County, North Carolina without emergency care, exemplifying the gaps in a $50 billion federal rural health fund Republicans crafted to support the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. Two years after his death, Debra Pierce still wonders if her brother Stanley Sears, 50, would have survived a heart attack if the hospital had remained open. Emergency crews from a neighboring town worked on Sears for a half hour but couldn’t revive him before the long drive to the nearest hospital.
The closure cascaded into broader emergency service failures: Martin County has no paramedics on its ambulances, and emergency rooms are 20 miles or more away and often overcrowded. With a population of about 22,000, Martin County appears on paper to be a top contender for the $213 million earmarked for North Carolina from the five-year Rural Health Transformation Program. Yet County Manager Drew Batts flatly stated the $50 billion fund “is not something that is specifically going to help our situation” and “It’s not going to help us get this place reopened.” Federal regulators limit how much can be spent on construction and building renovations, and North Carolina distributes money only to existing health organizations.
County taxpayers have invested an estimated $2.9 million in maintenance and utilities on the closed hospital building, hoping to resume operations. The county now considers spending at least $1.5 million to create two higher-level paramedic units with quick-response vehicles equipped with electrocardiogram equipment. ECU Health, the region’s largest system with nine hospitals, serves as a de facto safety net for 29 counties but cannot absorb the demand: since Martin General closed, the system reported a 132% increase in daily emergency room visits. ECU Health’s Greenville hospital—the state’s only Level 1 trauma center east of Raleigh—has long median emergency room wait and treatment times, longer than 96% of hospitals nationwide.
Political Debate Over Cuts
The rural health fund has become central to a closely watched U.S. House race between Democrat Don Davis and Republican Laurie Buckhout. However, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act that includes the rural fund is expected to reduce federal Medicaid spending by more than $900 billion over a decade, cuts projected to hit rural hospitals especially hard. During recent testimony on Capitol Hill, ECU Health CEO Michael Waldrum stated his system expects to lose a billion dollars over the next 10 years from the looming Medicaid cuts, suggesting the rural fund will not come close to offsetting those losses.
This article is an AI-assisted summary. All facts and figures are drawn from the original report: https://www.wuga.org/2026-05-22/well-never-know-if-he-could-have-been-saved-the-gaps-in-trumps-rural-health-fund