Conservative GOP mayor from N.C. walks to D.C. to protest hospital closure due to Medicaid inertia

A Republican mayor in a small North Carolina town recently walked 273 miles to Washington, D.C., to protest the closure of a local hospital — partly due to the Republican-led state's refusal to expand Medicaid under federal health reform — after a local woman died from a heart attack while waiting for emergency services, reports Emery Dalesio for The Associated Press. (News-Record photo by Travis Fain: Mayor Adam O’Neal leaving a meeting at the governor's mansion in Virginia)

Mayor Adam O’Neal was protesting the closing of Vidant Pungo Hospital in Belhaven on July 1. "O’Neal took to task both hospital officials, who he said are putting profits over people’s health, and elected state officials, who refused federal funding to expand Medicaid that would pay the bills of poor people," Dalesio writes. O'Neal told him, “Profits are more important to them than lives." (Read more)

What makes the story even more compelling is that O'Neal, who is no fan of Obama, is "a white Southerner and a Republican officeholder who has conservative views on abortion, taxes, guns, — 'you name it,' he told me," Dana Milbank reports for The Washington Post.

Six days after the local hospital closed, 48-year-old Portia Gibbs had a heart attack, Milbank writes. "The medevac to take her to the next-nearest hospital (as many as 84 miles away, depending on where you live) didn’t get there in time." O'Neal told Milbank, "She spent the last hour of her life in a parking lot at a high school waiting for a helicopter."

"Republicans nationwide have abandoned any consideration of offering an alternative to the Affordable Care Act, figuring that their complaints about President Obama’s selective implementation of the law, and lingering unease about the legislation itself, will be enough to motivate conservative voters in November," Milbank writes. "But as O’Neal points out, this political calculation has a moral flaw."

O'Neal told Milbank, "If the governor and the legislature don’t want to accept Medicaid expansion, they need to come up with another program to assure that rural hospitals don’t close They’re allowing people to die to prove a point. That is wrong, and I’m not going to be a party to that.” (Read more)