KSHB 41 reporter Elyse Schoenig covers the cities of Shawnee and Mission. She also focuses on issues surrounding the cost of health care, saving for retirement and personal debt. Share your story idea with Elyse.
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In Sweet Springs, Missouri, faded lettering on an abandoned building is all that's left to show for the area's only hospital.
The rural town of 1,500 people is about an hour east of Kansas City and has been without a hospital for years. It relies on neighboring towns for its primary health care.
Some Missouri leaders are preparing for reductions in Medicaid spending, saying Tuesday that rural hospitals in small towns like Sweet Springs could face the most severe impacts. This comes after H.R.1, signed into law as President Trump's One Big Beautiful Bill Act, is set to reduce federal Medicaid spending by around $911 billion over the next 10 years.
"For doctors, you would go out of town," said Kathy Navarro, a Sweet Springs resident. "You've got Concordia, Waverly, Marshall and Sedalia. If it's a specialty, they'll send you on from there."
But that 30-minute to an hour-long drive can mean the difference between life and death when a town loses its only hospital.
"It is a loss. It is," Navarro said.
While Sweet Springs still maintains an ambulance district, the town has experienced multiple hospital closures. The hospital before the most recent one shut down in the 1990s.
"Today, we're a town of 1,500 people. We have no doctors, we have no dentists, we have no hospitals," said Bill Koch, who served on the board for the older of the two closed hospitals.
According to nonpartisan health care nonprofit KFF, the president's budget bill will reduce federal Medicaid spending in rural areas by $137 billion over the next 10 years. KFF also estimates this will result in a loss of $4.53 billion to rural areas in Missouri.
"You start doing damage to Medicaid, you start doing damage to rural hospitals," said U.S. Rep. Emanuel Cleaver.
Cleaver says he remembers how the most recent hospital closure in Sweet Springs affected people. He spoke about it at a roundtable on Medicaid Tuesday at University Health in Kansas City.
"We have at least four rural hospitals in Missouri that are at risk," Cleaver said.
He wouldn't specify which hospitals are at risk, or where.
Meanwhile, residents like Navarro know they'll keep looking out for each other in Sweet Springs.
"With that comes the doctors, with that comes the therapies ... yeah, we need a hospital," Navarro said.
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