A new report from the conservative group Defend Forgotten America details how 90 rural hospitals nationwide are closed or facing credit downgrades representing what the group calls a “national health access emergency” that demands a solution by President Donald Trump and his administration.
“President Trump’s historic Rural Health Transformation Program could not come at a more urgent time,” the report, provided exclusively to Breitbart News ahead of its public release, opens. “After years of targeting and neglect under the Biden administration, across the United States, hospitals are entering a systemic distress cycle that is visible in financial markets before doors close to patients. In 2025 alone, at least 90 hospitals have experienced credit rating downgrades, service eliminations, or full closures. These distress events reveal a patterned, multi-signal collapse with credit downgrades often preceding a loss of essential services.”
As the report notes, Trump’s administration is already taking steps to address the crisis, with the rollout of the Rural Health Transformation Program and announced grants from the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), led by Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz. CMS announced the program in late 2025, with $50 billion in grants to help address this crisis nationwide. But these statistics compiled by Defend Forgotten America, the new grassroots America First organization headed by former NewsMax journalist Jenn Pellegrino, are stunning.
“When a hospital closes, communities lose far more than a building,” Pellegrino said in a statement accompanying the report. “They lose emergency care, maternity services, jobs, and the ability to attract families and employers. The Rural Health Transformation Program is a critical first step, and we need all levels of government tackling this crisis.”
The report reveals that there have been 29 credit rating downgrades and 61 service losses or outright closures at rural hospitals nationwide in just the past year. There have been 24 full hospital closures, and 24 other hospitals have shuttered maternity and obstetrics departments—often the first part of a hospital in financial trouble to go—as well as other clinic closures and the loss of emergency and other critical services.
DFA – Hospitals Are Failing by Breitbart News
“Credit rating downgrades from Moody’s and Fitch signal that a hospital or health system is less able to meet its financial obligations. Downgrades increase borrowing costs, restrict access to capital, and often precede service cuts, restructuring, or closure,” the report continues, adding as well of maternity services: “Maternity units are among the most resource-intensive services hospitals provide and are often the first eliminated once financial stress accelerates. Peer-reviewed research and federal data consistently show that when maternity services disappear, care does not relocate cleanly.”
These closures also have significant impacts on newborns, including higher rates of preterm birth and low birth weight as well as out-of-hospital emergency deliveries of babies. This is because the hospital or maternity wing closures often mean travel for expectant mothers to a hospital can increase by half an hour or in some cases more than an hour. It also leads, the report notes, to “reduced prenatal visit adherence, particularly for high-risk pregnancies.” Communities, meanwhile, are negatively impacted by it all as they have more difficulty attracting young families, doctors and other health professionals, and employers, since bigger companies would prefer to be near healthy hospital systems.
The second page of the two-page report lists the 90 different hospitals nationwide hit with closures or credit rating downgrades last year. They’re as far-ranging as Maine and Vermont in the northeast down through North Carolina, Georgia, and Florida in the southeast, across the country to California, Oregon, and Washington Statem and everywhere in between like Tennessee, Illinois, Missouri, Oklahoma, Alabama, Kentucky, West Virginia, Minnesota, Montana, Ohio, South Dakota, Indiana, and more. Basically, the gist here is, almost no state has been spared and this crisis has hit red states and blue states equally hard.
How the Trump administration handles this moving forward beyond the initial grants from CMS as part of the Rural Health Transformation Program is going to be a critical issue for Oz, Trump, Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr., and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. All eyes are on the White House and key administration leaders as well as Congress as they tackle this in 2026.