Video: "Walking Mayor" Adam O'Neal Speaks Passionately about Rural Healthcare en Route to Washington

http://www.bluevirginia.us/diary/11948/video-walking-mayor-adam-oneal-arrives-at-pw-county-community-health-center-in-woodbridge-va

From a fact sheet on Mayor O'Neal and his walk:

"Mayor Adam O'Neal is a 45-year-old conservative Republican, former football player with a hard nose attitude. He became Mayor 10 years ago by reaching out to the 2/3 African American majority in his town of 1,700. He has represented them well and been reelected by large margins...On July 14, Rev. Barber said a prayer to bless Mayor O’neal’s 273 mile walk to Washington DC. On July 28, he will be there to greet him, where the two will lead a rally for rural healthcare and Medicaid expansion at the US Capitol....

...Vidant Health, Inc. purchased Pungo District Hospital in O'Neal's town of Belhaven, NC in 2012, promising to be the savior for a "Critical Access" hospital that had been a fixture in his community for 60 years. It was the first hospital to open under the Hill/Burton Act of 1946, designed to bring hospitals and emergency care into rural America.

Although the terms of the contract stated that the hospital would remain open, and that Vidant Health would invest $2.4 million in improving services, Vidant Health decided not to invest that money and instead stripped out valuable equipment and profitable serivces. Theyclose the hospital 18 months after taking it over. They said it was losing too much money, and indeed the yearly losses had increased to over $1 million due to mismanagement and creative accounting (for instance, the six figure executive who ran the hospital also ran 2 other hospitals and visited briefly only once a week, yet his entire salary was included in the Pungo hospital balance sheet).

Mayor O'Neal was outraged that the town had not been warned nor consulted, and, many agreed with him that the contract Vidant Health had signed (then then were known as University Health Systems) had been breached. Many suspect that Vidant intended to close the hospital when it purchased it, given that it purchased a neighboring hospital 30 miles away during the same period...This is a trend in rural areas across America, particularly in states that refused to expand Medicaid. 46 million Americans live in rural areas like eastern NC, where there is only one medical facility serving one or more counties and tens of thousands of people. More such hospitals have closed in the last year than in the 15 previous years. "