Congressman visits Southern Illinois hospital to spotlight the impact of The Big Beautiful Bill
BENTON, Ill. (KBSI) – United States Representative Raja Krishnamoorthi took a tour of the Franklin hospital today July 29 2025 in Benton Illinois as its one of the hospitals to be considered at risk of downsizing or closing due to a loss of funding from The Big Beautiful Bill.
“We can’t really operate our royal economy without these royal hospitals because these patients have nowhere else to go. In a lot of places, they’d have to drive hours to get the treatment that they would otherwise receive here for instance” says Congressman Krishnamoorthi.
Under the big, beautiful bill passed on July 4th, 2025, substantial cuts to Medicaid funding could affect rural hospitals in a big way. Congressman Raja toured the hospital and met with hospital workers. According to Raja the bill would cut 1.2 trillion from Medicaid funding over the next 10 years, which would leave a direct impact on rural hospitals that mostly serve clients on Medicaid.
“We have to remember that without these rural hospitals A-“We don’t have healthcare options, especially for people who don’t have options otherwise” and B-“We don’t want a situation where we end up only relying on large university healthcare centers and large hospitals that are just more expensive honestly. These folks are able to keep down costs in a way that other centers don’t” says Congressman Krishnamoorthi.
Franklin Hospital CEO James Johnson says that Medicaid represents at least a third of the patients they see at the hospital. He shares that changes to the assessment tax could mean major cuts to the hospital.
“The assessment tax is our inflationary factor for the last 30 years because we’ve never gotten an increase from Medicaid on a claims basis in the last 30 years so that’s what takes us from losing on a Medicaid patient to breaking even on a Medicaid patient” says Johnson. “So were really focused on the assessment tax and if anything is taken away from that it could be very detrimental to us and that would be the key to having to downsize or cut services or things like that.”
Congressman Raja says this issue is personal to him as his wife works at a rural healthcare clinic and he sees firsthand the need.
He shares that rural hospitals and clinics could see affects from this bill as soon as 2027 but he hopes to help change that.
“I will be going back to Washington with this particular issue in mind as we deal with the implementation of the ‘large lousy law’ and do whatever we can to prevent the cuts” says Congressman Krishnamoorthi.
