If you have never lived in Alabama's Black Belt, it is hard to understand what it means when the only hospital for miles closes. It is not an inconvenience. It is the difference between making it to the emergency room and not. It is a mother driving an hour in labor because the nearest delivery ward shut down. It is a heart attack victim in the back of an ambulance whose closest option is now two counties away. It is a community that has already lost so much, losing the one thing it cannot afford to lose.

Grove Hill Memorial Hospital. Hill Hospital of Sumter County. Hale County Hospital. These are not statistics. These are the places where Black Belt Alabamians go when their children run fevers that won't break, when their fathers have strokes, when their bodies give out in the middle of the night and there is nowhere else to turn. And right now, all three are at heightened risk of closing.

Alabama's rural hospitals were already struggling long before the Big Beautiful Bill passed last year. Twenty-seven of the state's rural hospitals, more than half, were already at risk of closure. Alabama has had among the lowest Medicare and Medicaid reimbursement rates in the country for decades, starving these facilities of the resources they need to stay open while still serving communities where a significant share of patients are children and low-income families enrolled in Medicaid and CHIP.

And now Congress is considering another round of health care cuts, this time to help pay for the war in Iran. Cutting the health care that Alabama's most vulnerable families depend on to fund a foreign military conflict is not a trade-off that any elected official should be willing to make. It is not a line item adjustment. It is a decision to let rural communities go without.

Alabama did not cause this crisis. Alabama's Black Belt communities have been underserved, underfunded, and overlooked for generations. They deserve representatives in Washington who will fight for them, not balance military budgets on the backs of the sick and the poor.

Sign this petition to call on Alabama's congressional delegation to oppose any further Medicare or Medicaid cuts, fight to raise chronically low rural reimbursement rates, and commit to keeping Grove Hill Memorial, Hill Hospital of Sumter County, and Hale County Hospital open and serving the communities that need them most.