The clinic was at the end of a craggy parking lot, in the husk of an old Dollar General, and on a morning in March when its future was more tenuous than ever, people were lining up to see a doctor while they still could. 'I've had a bad couple days'I'm tired,' said Nelson, giving her phone number. 'That's a landline.' She sat down in the waiting room, beyond which was Perry County, Alabama, an area of roughly 700 square miles with no hospital, one ambulance, and a per capita income of $16,900 a year. People called the clinic Cahaba, which was short for Cahaba Medical Care, a larger system that was managing to get doctors into some of the poorest, sickest, least-served parts of the state, and whose leaders were now worried that years of painstaking work were about to be undone. The reason wasn't only because so many patients relied on Medicaid, which was currently being targeted by the Trump administration for $880 billion in cuts. Cahaba's clinics also depended upon an array of more...
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