Biden administration invests heavily in getting rural West Virginia hospital re-opened.

https://signalpress.blogspot.com/2024/08/biden-administration-invests-heavily-in.html

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.

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