A hospital saved her son. What happens now that it's closed?
Marketplace All-in-One
Marketplace
4.5 • 1.4K Ratings
🗓️ 9 June 2026
⏱️ 8 minutes
🔗️ Recording | Apple Podcasts | RSS
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Summary
We heard earlier about the closure of a hospital in Thomasville, Alabama, as part of our series chronicling the economic crisis that rural hospitals are facing. Now, “Marketplace Morning Report” host Kimberly Adams speaks with the director of Thomasville’s public library about the critical role the hospital played during a personal emergency and where community members turn now that it’s closed. But first, we’ll check on how small businesses feel about inflation and find out how SpaceX’s initial public offering could affect the rest of the market.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | A top concern for small business owners right now? Rising prices, just like the rest of us. From Marketplace, I'm Kimberly Adams. The Consumer Price Index, also known as CPI, for May comes out tomorrow. It measures how prices for some consumer goods change over time. But consumers aren't the only ones feeling |
| 0:22.1 | squeezed by higher prices right now. The National Federation of Independent Business, or NFIB, |
| 0:28.0 | released a new survey this morning, and it shows that inflation is also a top concern for companies. |
| 0:33.9 | Marketplace's Nancy Marshall Gins joins me now to talk about this. Good morning, Nancy. |
| 0:38.9 | Good morning. So just how big of a problem is inflation for small companies? |
| 0:44.0 | Well, small business owners were asked about this in the survey, which is called the NFIB Small Business Optimism Index. |
| 0:50.6 | 18% of them said inflation was their most important business problem, and that's the highest |
| 0:56.5 | rate since December of 2024. |
| 0:59.5 | What are they paying more for? |
| 1:00.7 | Did they talk about specific costs that are rising for them? |
| 1:04.1 | Yeah, many of them mentioned the price of fuel, especially companies involved in transportation. |
| 1:09.1 | Almost a third say they're also paying their employees more. |
| 1:13.1 | They're facing higher interest rates on their loans. A farmer in the survey complained about the |
| 1:17.7 | high cost of seeds and fertilizer. And small business owners are also unhappy about the high |
| 1:22.8 | cost of insurance from car and property insurance to health insurance for workers. |
| 1:28.7 | How are small firms handling these increasing costs, passing them on to customers? |
| 1:34.0 | In some cases, yes. More than a third of the business owners in the NFIB survey have raised |
| 1:39.1 | their prices. And that's the highest reading since March of 2023 as we were coming out of the pandemic. |
| 1:46.1 | One business quoted in the survey said its price hikes couldn't keep up with its rising costs. |
| 1:51.0 | A construction company said the cost of everything it buys is up, but it hasn't increased its bid prices and its earnings are down. |
| 1:57.6 | So not surprisingly, around a third of the firms in the survey |
| 2:01.4 | planned to hike their prices over the summer, and that will feed right into the CPI. |
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