Last month, the only hospital in the sleepy town of Belhaven in eastern North Carolina closed its doors, prompting Belhaven Mayor Adam O'Neal to step out of party lines and call for an expansion of Medicaid in North Carolina. And then he took a lot more steps.
The Republican mayor and self-proclaimed conservative spent the last two weeks walking the 237 miles from eastern North Carolina to Washington, D.C., to raise awareness of the need to save his and other rural hospitals around the nation.
O'Neal did it with the support of the North Carolina chapter of the NAACP. O'Neal, Belhaven residents and NAACP members met on the front steps of a U.S. Senate building on Monday. They demanded the reopening of the hospital and hoped to draw attention to what they call a rural health care crisis.
The protesters fear that the 20,000 residents of Beaufort and Hyde counties will have to travel as far as 75 miles for emergency department facilities. O'Neal asserts that people will die as a result of the hospital's closure and that one woman, 48-year-old Portia Gibbs, was the first victim of Vidant Health's "shameless and immoral" decision to close the hospital.
Barry Gibbs, husband of Portia Gibbs, joined O'Neal at the rally in D.C. He says his wife died as a result of delayed care, waiting for a helicopter to airlift her to Norfolk, Va., because the hospital in Belhaven had closed. There aren't any doctor practices or hospitals in Hyde County.
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