Tucson doctors & healthcare execs share troubling prognosis with Dem candidate Mendoza

Congressional candidate Joanna Mendoza gathered together nine local experts on health care for an hour-long roundtable discussion of some of the biggest challenges facing hospitals and clinics in both urban and rural Arizona.

“I am interested in hearing from you all,” Mendoza said at the start of Tuesday's conversation. “Not only the challenges, but the recommendations that you might have. And I really do think there's a long list of things that need to get fixed, but you all are the experts.”

Mendoza, who is seeking to unseat Republican U.S. Rep. Juan Ciscomani in the Nov. 3 midterm election, has said that healthcare cuts in the budget passed by Republicans last year – aka the One Big Beautiful Bill – are going to harm Southern Arizona healthcare programs, hospitals and clinics.

Julia Strange, Tucson Medical Center’s vice president of external affairs, said hospitals are bracing a financial crunch when the federal government reduces payments to hospitals for treating uninsured patients while also forcing low-income people off Medicaid, “which leads to bad debt and charity care hospitals.”

“No matter what your insurance is, you're going to be affected by this bill,” said Strange, who warned that patients would overwhelm emergency rooms if they couldn’t find care elsewhere.

“We'll go back to where we were in 2006 when it was 18-hour waits,” she said. “The health systems across the state are doing a ton of work to understand how to try to mitigate this.”

Strange said AI advances could bring some efficiencies and “I think we'll address some of these issues. But services are going to close, and hospitals will close. People focus on rural, but the urban hospitals are just as vulnerable.”

A study by Third Way estimated that 10 hospitals in and around Congressional District 6 could close as a result of the GOP budget signed into law by President Donald Trump because it cuts nearly a trillion dollars from Medicaid and other healthcare programs.

Daniel Derksen, director of the University of Arizona Center for Rural Health, said he was concerned about the “incredibly scary” provisions in the GOP budget plan that are “basically implementing things that make it harder for people to stay enrolled in Medicaid.”

“That's a huge concern,” Derksen said. “I don't care if you practice in a rural area or urban area, hospital or clinic, no one can absorb a loss of 10 to 15 percent of those who have a payment source from their thing and still operate the types of services we need, like maternal healthcare.”

Ciscomani's office did not respond to the Sentinel's questions regarding concerns about hospital closures and overcrowding.

Mendoza held the roundtable discussion on Tuesday in a public meeting room of the Murphy-Wilmot Library, inviting members of the press to attend. Ciscomani held a closed-door meeting with area healthcare executives and controversial Health & Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. at the beginning of April, putting out a press release after the event.

Derksen said that the GOP budget bill contained one good provision: the Rural Health Transformation Program, which is designed to assist rural health clinics with technological improvements, such as AI programs and telemedicine.

He said about half the state’s funding for the program would be in rural health workforce development, “which is very good, but there's a significant chunk for things that I think are really going to transform the way we teach, the way we learn, and all that. That's digital transformation, artificial intelligence.”

In a newsletter to constituents this week, Ciscomani called the program a “historic investment in rural health care." 

Ciscomani told constituents that the overall program would spend $50 billion over the next five years across the nation, but he himself expressed disappointment that Arizona received so little of the funding compared to other states. Arizona received $167 million for the first year of the program.

That was the sixth-lowest per-capita distribution of the funds among the 50 states, according to a KFF analysis.

Ciscomani told the Tucson Sentinel in January that Arizona’s allocation of the funding “falls short of my expectations.”

“The working families in rural Arizona deserve to get their fair share,” Ciscomani said. “This can only be achieved by working in close partnership with the Trump administration and Gov. Hobbs’ office – a bipartisan effort I will continue to pursue for AZ06. This fight is far from over.”

The concern that Arizona was being shortchanged was echoed earlier this year by El Rio Community Health Center CEO Clinton Kuntz, who told the Sentinel in January that the “allocation is lower than expected, and that raises more concerns for providers already operating on very thin margins. An important point to remember is that this fund is intended to support transformation, technology, and innovation, not replace the Medicaid dollars that rural areas and providers stand to lose.”

A shortage of healthcare workers in Southern Arizona was mentioned by several participants at Tuesday’s roundtable.

Sue Heck, a retired nurse practitioner, said the Trump administration had moved to reduce the loan amounts available for people studying to become nurses.

“There’s a healthcare worker shortage and now it’s going to get worse,” said Heck.

Mendoza herself recalled struggling to find a pediatrician when she retired from the Marines and moved back to Pinal County in 2016.

“It was really stressful, not only newly out of the military after 20 years, but now being a brand-new mom and trying to find health care for my son,” she said. “This is an issue that is very near and dear to my heart personally, not only because of my personal experience, but also just seeing the sticking points, the challenges that a lot of folks face in obtaining access to health care.”

At the close of the discussion, Heck said she was concerned about how HHS Secretary Kennedy is changing vaccine protocols, especially for children. 

“I was concerned about Bobby Kennedy and the vaccine problems and how so many kids are going to get sick and die because of his misinformation and how he's destroying public health,” Heck said. 

Mendoza said she agreed with concerns about Kennedy’s leadership, given how he was upending decades of vaccine protocol and curtailing research projects, such as ending support for mRNA vaccines that allowed the United States to swiftly develop and test COVID-19 vaccines within a year of the 2020 outbreak. 

Ciscomani’s office did not respond to questions regarding cuts in federal funding for healthcare programs or Kennedy’s changes in vaccine protocols and research efforts. 

But Ciscomani did host Kennedy in Southern Arizona earlier this month at a closed-to-the-press event with 13 local healthcare and business leaders, including El Rio’s Kuntz, TMC President and CEO Jennifer Mendrzycki, Dr. Benjamin Schwartz of Banner—University Medicine, St. Joseph Hospital CEO Monica Vargas and Joe Snell, president of the Southern Arizona Chamber. 

"It was an honor to join Secretary Kennedy at this roundtable and bring together local leaders alongside a fearless advocate who has championed our shared goal of making America healthy again,” Ciscomani said in an April press release about the event. 

"This discussion was an invaluable opportunity to collaborate on how we can advance that mission across Southern Arizona, from supporting our children to strengthening care for seniors in our communities,” he said in the release. 

In his press release, the Republican congressman said he had pushed for $100 million in funding for Kennedy’s Make American Health Again initiative, as well as funding for various other healthcare programs and research. 

Mendoza said Tuesday that she hadn’t heard about Kennedy’s Southern Arizona tour with Ciscomani. “I didn't even know that he had done that. I mean, it's things like that that we as constituents feel like we don't know about,” the Democrat said.

This article was originally published by the Tucson Sentinel