Mainstream Media Turns (on the GOP) with Obamacare

This took a while:

On July 1, the hospital in rural Belhaven, N.C., closed — a victim, in part, of the decision by the state’s governor and legislature to reject the expansion of Medicaid under Obamacare.

Six days later, 48-year-old Portia Gibbs, a local resident, had a heart attack. The medevac to take her to the next-nearest hospital (as many as 84 miles away, depending on where you live) didn’t get there in time.

“She spent the last hour of her life in a parking lot at a high school waiting for a helicopter,” Belhaven’s mayor, Adam O’Neal, said outside the U.S. Capitol on Monday, holding a framed photograph of Gibbs.

A week after Gibbs’s death, O’Neal began a 15-day, 273-mile walk to Washington to draw attention to the outrage in Belhaven, which he blames on the combination of an “immoral” hospital operator and the failure of Republican leaders in his state to accept the new Medicaid funding the hospital needed to stay afloat.

What makes the mayor’s journey all the more compelling is he’s a white Southerner and a Republican officeholder who has conservative views on abortion, taxes, guns — “you name it,” he told me. But ideology and party loyalty have limits. “I’m a pretty conservative guy, but this is a matter of people dying,” he said.

This starts with Dana Milbank. It doesn't stop here. The floodgates of public opinion may finally be open.

Special clinic for the poor: When people don't have access, it's a moral failure.