Cuts to Illinois' Medicaid program have been in effect for about a week now.
One program that was eliminated, adult dental care.
And that's hitting rural areas especially hard.
The cuts have a Henderson County clinic balancing providing care with staying open.
Henderson County has 72-hundred people living in it.
And with a mostly agricultural economy, dental insurance is hard to come by.
"We've been fortunate to have some Medicaid dental care in the past, but it is a poor county," says acting county health director Lynne Haase. She says the end of Medicaid's adult dental care program has laid a tough decision on kitchen tables.
"How do you tell somebody you need to go to the dentist regularly when you're trying to put food on the table."
Eagle View community health care is one of the few offices accepting Medicaid patients in the area. And the dental program cuts have hurt the clinic.
"We've had to make cuts here as far as laying people off, we've had to eliminate some extra benefits that we've had here," says Clinic Board Chairman Coral Seitz.
She says 66 percent of the clinic's patients received Medicaid benefits of some sort.
Before the state cuts the clinic charged 98 dollars per dentist appointment.
And the state paid all of it.
After the cut the clinic will charge 40 dollars per dentist appointment.
And now the patient pays all the bill.
"We're not liking it but we want to keep the doors open so the community has the healthcare that they need."
Seitz says the clinic is designed to lose some money on patient care. But with fewer dollars coming in, Dental Director Cathy Anderson says they'll do the only thing they feel is right.
"We'll just have to open up our service area further, and we won't turn anybody away."
A plan to bring in more patients and hopefully spread out the cost of Illinois' lost dental assistance.
The Eagle View system is classified as a federal rural health clinic.
That allows it to get federal grants to help cover the cost of charity care.
But the clinic typically exhausts its grant funding well before each year is over.
