Eleven of the 24 counties in the Fifth District, which runs a long way down 29, from Charlottesville to the North Carolina border, through Lynchburg and Danville, and down 15 through Farmville, and 360 to South Boston, and a lot of wide open space, have no OB-GYN.
You know why.
Centra Southside Community Hospital in Farmville cut its labor and delivery services in December, citing “recently enacted reductions in federal healthcare funding.”
Which are in place due to the Big Beautiful Bill passed by the MAGAs in Congress last summer, and signed into law by Donald Trump on July 4, 2025.
From the archives
- Coverage of the Fifth District race: click here.
A report from the Kaiser Family Foundation projects that the Commonwealth could end up losing as much as $4 billion a year in federal healthcare funding over the next 10 years, and six rural Virginia hospitals made the list of the more than 300 nationwide that face possible closure because of the loss of reimbursements from Medicaid impacting their bottom lines.
Cuts to rural areas, which tend to vote, disproportionately, Republican, run counter to what would seem to be political common sense.
John McGuire, for instance, who voted for the Big Beautiful Bill, and thus, the cuts to hospitals in his rural congressional district, you’d think he’d want to help constituents in his red district who want to crank out kids to be the MAGA voters of the next generation.
Not sure what’s going on there.
“A person’s ZIP code should not determine whether or not they can access prenatal care and start a family,” said Tom Perriello, in a statement issued by his congressional campaign after his visit on Friday with the staff at the PATHS Community Medical Center in Danville.
“One of my top priorities in Congress will be to reverse the attacks on rural healthcare before McGuire’s ticking time bomb of Medicaid cuts ignites next year. The war on rural healthcare from Washington not only hurts our local families, but also puts Danville’s long-earned economic recovery at risk,” Perriello said.
I get in trouble with other Democrats, for some reason, when I point out that Perriello, back in his one term representing the Fifth District in Congress, took the principled stand of voting for the Affordable Care Act, in 2010, when it would have been more advantageous to his political career to vote against the bill.
Like I’m the bad guy, for restating the obvious – that he lost his re-election bid that year precisely because he voted yes.
I don’t get other Democrats, but that’s another story for another day.
“I’ve taken the hard vote to expand affordable healthcare, even when the insurance lobbyists threatened me, and I’m ready to do it again. I am going to Washington to make life easier for your family, not to make it easier for me to get re-elected,” Perriello said on Friday.
You’d think Democrats would embrace this.
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Chris Graham
