With midterm elections just months away, the top economic concern for voters is the cost of health care.

That's according to a recent poll from the health policy nonprofit KFF.

With that in mind, the Marketplace Morning Report team traveled to southwest Alabama

to learn more about how policy decisions at the national level lead to consequences for health care access

in local communities across rural America.

As I've been reflecting on those travels, a few things stand out. For one, many of the people

we met often have to travel hours for basic health care needs,

and experts say that's a fate that lies ahead for even more communities because of changing federal policies.

There are about 700 hospitals at risk of closure in rural communities around the U.S., according to the Center for Healthcare Quality and Payment Reform.

In the absence of action to address health care shortages, many communities are turning within,

leaning on each other and their own resilience to navigate the complicated landscape of what services remain.

Welcome to our series, The Rural Health Care Crisis. Welcome to our series, the rural health care crisis, what might be coming for communities

around the country and what can be done about it. We start in Thomasville, Alabama, a community

already familiar with this.

So this is wild. There's still the paper on the exam chair. It's almost as if we're walking through

just early in the morning before it's about to open. This is the Thomasville Regional Medical Center,

or perhaps we should say was, because right now, the bright reception areas, brand new surgery facilities, and the only in-house MRI machine for dozens of miles are all empty.

Good morning, Mr. Mayor. Nice to meet you. Thank you so much for meeting us today. I appreciate it. Sheldon Day, the mayor of Thomasville, is our tour guide. We're about an hour and a half north of Mobile in Alabama's 7th Congressional District, an area with some of the lowest life expectancies in the entire country, which is why Day says Thomasville needs its hospital.

We have a primary care clinic here with all the bells and whistles.

We were the only hospital in the region that did 3D digital mammograms.

The only thing you're missing is patients.

The medical center closed in 2024 less than five years after it opened.

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