Mike Olcott Doesn’t Know Why Hospitals Are Closing. That’s The Problem.

Texas can’t afford to keep electing people who won’t do the work.

This legislative session has tested every ounce of restraint I have. Week after week, it’s been a challenge not just to say it plainly: too many Republican lawmakers in Texas are too ill-equipped, too intellectually disengaged, and frankly, too dim to be making decisions that affect millions of lives. I’ve tried to keep it civil. I’ve tried to focus on policy. But yesterday, Representative Mike Olcott said one of the stupidest things I’ve heard in a long, long time, and that’s saying something in a building where logic goes to die.

In a hearing on public health, Olcott looked his colleagues in the eye and declared that no one really knows why 181 rural hospitals have closed in Texas since 2005. Not him, not anyone. “I don’t know the answer to that,” he said, “and I don’t think anyone does.”

But we do know the answer to that. We’ve known for many years. So, let this sink in. A sitting lawmaker, surrounded by decades of data, legislative research staff, and entire state agencies built to analyze this exact issue, chooses to throw his hands up and chalk it all up to mystery.

This happened during Olcott’s layout for HB 2587, a measure that would require Texas hospitals to ask patients about their immigration status and then compile annual reports on the care they provide to people who are “not lawfully present.” Olcott claimed the bill is framed as an effort to promote data transparency. In reality, it’s a political stunt, a way to imply, without evidence, that undocumented immigrants are somehow to blame for the collapse of rural healthcare.

Olcott doesn’t even need to “wonder” why rural hospitals are closing. The answers are already available, published by the REPUBLICAN Comptroller’s Office.

In October 2022, FiscalNotes, the official publication of the Texas Comptroller, released a detailed report titled “Rural Counties Face Hospital Closures: The Economics of Medical Care Outside of Cities.” It’s not vague. It’s not speculative. It spells out, with data and expert commentary, exactly why rural healthcare in Texas is on the brink.

Rural hospitals don’t have large, well-insured patient bases to sustain their operations. Full stop. They’re overwhelmed by high fixed costs for services that might go unused for days, like emergency rooms that must remain staffed around the clock. They’re struggling with staff shortages. They face declining populations, shrinking tax bases, and rapidly aging infrastructure. In short, they are buckling under systemic pressures that are entirely predictable and entirely fixable… if lawmakers would actually read their own reports.

“Rural providers have limited ability to recoup costs from patients and insurers due to underinsurance and low incomes,” the article notes. “Overall, they have high operating costs, mostly due to the cost of mandatory ‘standby’ services.”

This isn’t some progressive think tank talking. This is the Republican-run Texas Comptroller’s Office.

The article also highlights the role of uncompensated care, but not in the way Olcott suggests. It’s a problem, yes. But it’s primarily tied to Texas’s refusal to expand Medicaid, not the presence of undocumented patients. In fact, the entire article fails to mention immigration as a meaningful contributor to the crisis at all because it isn’t.

And the solutions Republican experts point to? They include expanding broadband for telehealth, increasing federal-state coordination on Medicaid waivers, modernizing emergency transportation systems, and addressing workforce shortages. None of that has anything to do with asking patients about their citizenship status.

So when Mike Olcott says we don’t know why rural hospitals are closing, he’s not revealing a mystery, he’s revealing that he hasn’t done the basic work of his job.

That’s not the only information Olcott could have found with a simple Google search:

• Center for Healthcare Quality and Payment Reform: States that expanded Medicaid have had far fewer rural hospital closures than non-expansion states like Texas.

• Kaiser Family Foundation: The Effects of Medicaid Expansion under the ACA: Studies from January 2014 to January 2020.

• American Hospital Association: The importance of Medicaid for rural hospitals and the potential consequences of funding changes.

Now, let’s be generous. Let’s give Representative Olcott the benefit of the doubt.

The man is seventy years old. He grew up and went to school in a different time. Maybe he still doesn’t know how to use Google. Maybe no one’s shown him how to type “why are rural hospitals closing in Texas” into a search bar. Maybe the algorithm just hasn’t been kind to him. We’ve all seen a relative or two confused by autofill.

But here’s the thing: you don’t need to know how to Google to find this information when you’re a Texas legislator.

Olcott has access to state agencies, legislative staff, public health experts, policy analysts, and nonpartisan research organizations whose entire job is to brief lawmakers on complex issues. He could’ve picked up the phone and called the Texas Health and Human Services Commission. He could have asked the Legislative Budget Board for a fiscal impact analysis. He could have read any number of reports by the Texas Hospital Association or asked his staff to pull data from the Texas Organization of Rural & Community Hospitals.

Hell, he could’ve wandered over to the Capitol Extension, bumped into a UT intern, and found out in five minutes flat that the lack of Medicaid expansion has hollowed out rural hospital budgets and driven many of them to the brink.

If he genuinely wanted to understand why rural hospitals are closing, he has every tool in the toolbox to figure it out. But instead of using those tools, he chose to lean on tired talking points and baseless scapegoating. Because for Olcott, and too many of his Republican colleagues, the priority isn’t solving real problems. It’s performing outrage. It’s blaming immigrants. It’s passing legislation that looks tough without making anyone healthier, safer, or better served.

And perhaps the most unsettling part?

Mike Olcott has a Ph.D. in Biochemistry. He’s not some random crank with a Facebook meme addiction… he’s a trained scientist. A man who spent decades in research. A man who presumably understands evidence, hypothesis testing, and basic logic.

And yet here he is, pushing a bill based on vibes and blame instead of data and reason. Watching a retired biochemist fail to apply even the most elementary critical thinking skills is more than frustrating. It’s a symptom of a broader rot in our political culture. We’re not just living through bad policy; we’re living through Idiocracy.

So what do we do?

We organize. We mobilize. And we stop letting these people run the show.

Because until we convince at least 7 million voters to get to the polls in 2026, this is the kind of leadership we’ll keep getting: disengaged, performative, and willfully ignorant.

So I’m asking:

Are you involved?

Are you a precinct chair?

Are you registered and helping register others?

Are you attending school board and city council meetings?

Are you donating to organizers or candidates who actually give a damn?

Are you having hard conversations with friends and family who’ve tuned out?

Because we can’t afford to wait until election season to start doing the work, rural hospitals are dying now. And Republicans like Mike Olcott are counting on your silence.

Let’s make them regret it.

• April 29: Early Voting Ends

• May 3: Local and County Elections

• June 2: The 89th Legislative Session ends.

• June 3: The beginning of the 2026 election season.

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