Ninth District Rep. Morgan Griffith toured SOVAH Martinsville on July 15, and later addressed the rural healthcare crisis along with the recent assassination attempt on President Trump.
Griffith, R-Salem, serves on the health sub-committee of energy and commerce, which prompted the invitation to Martinsville.
“The committee has jurisdiction over CDC, NIH, CMS, HHS,” Griffith said of federal health agencies. “I sit on the committee with policy jurisdiction.”
He said that he felt that it was important to visit hospitals and added that meeting the people working at the hospitals was the most important thing.
“I was very impressed by the folks that I met,” Griffith said, and explained that rural health is a challenge, with both Henry and Patrick counties as well as the City of Martinsville, considered rural areas.
Patrick County’s Pioneer Community Hospital closed in 2017 after its owners filed for bankruptcy in 2016, Griffith said, adding the hospital property was later sold to Foresight Health.
“If anything was done that was criminal or not, I do not know,” he said. “I have known for some time, and alerted some people that they weren’t doing things the way that they should be done.”
Griffith, who had a hand in getting the hospital in Lee County reopened, is “ready to do it in this one” in Patrick County, he said. However, the company representatives did not contact him or Sens. Tim Kaine and Mark Warner.
Griffith said that the local government would be the ones to take hold of the hospital if it turned into public property.
“Right now, they (local government) don’t have control of the building,” Griffith said, although he has heard “some interest.”
An incentive program to attract health workers to rural areas has been discussed, but Griffith said he doesn’t expect movement within the next year.
“You pay people to come into areas that are underserved. I’m a proponent of that. I would support that. You’ve got to find the votes” to pass it, Griffith said.
To gain ground and attract attention, Griffith suggested a coalition of people from the underserved communities need to voice their needs to get real movement.
“Right now, I don’t think we have the votes to vote in that (incentive) bill,” Griffith said.
Griffith also voiced his support for President Donald Trump, who was the target of a foiled assassination attempt while conducting a rally in Butler, Pa., Griffith noted that rhetoric found online sometimes pushes individuals towards extreme acts.
“The internet and social media have people believing that if you’re not with me, you’re evil,” Griffith said. However, “I am a big believer that, while I think my Democratic colleagues are misguided – and while there’s always a few evil people – 99 percent of the people are pretty good people just trying to do what’s right.”
He said what triggered the attempt on Trump’s life, but people should “take a deep breath. The United States of America is a great country if we don’t divide ourselves and turn to violence at every turn, we can work out our issues and our problems.”
Griffith said that the country is lucky that Trump wasn’t killed or badly injured.
The country has been strained recently by inflation, an issue that Griffith said is his constituent’s number one issue. With America setting on a huge wealth of energy, he said he felt it was being squandered, and pointed to recent policy changes that force ratepayers to foot the bills for the switch to solar and wind energy.
Protecting the border is also a major point of concern at the moment, Griffith said.
“The border is a mess. It didn’t have to be a mess,” Griffith said, adding that in previous administrations, including democratically controlled ones, “the border wasn’t this bad. So, what’s the difference? The implementation of policy at the federal level by the president.”
There will be some ongoing issues at the border, even with better policies in place, because “you can’t seal it off completely,” Griffith said. “I’m a big believer in building the fence, but you can’t seal it off completely.”
It is possible, however, to direct the flow, which is not a possibility under the current policies.
“We do not have control of the border,” he said, adding that the cartels are currently controlling the area and that it’s “outrageous.”
