Chippewa Valley Residents Protest Recent Healthcare Cuts

A group of Chippewa Valley residents gathered at Mayo Clinic Health System in Eau Claire on Wednesday to protest federal healthcare cuts.

The event aimed to highlight the one year anniversary of President Donald Trump signing the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. The Chippewa Valley has faced a healthcare crisis since the closure of the HSHS hospitals and Prevea Clinics over two years ago. Those federal cuts have further exacerbated that crisis, threatening more rural healthcare systems and forcing more residents to pay unaffordable insurance premiums.

Dr. Kristen Dall-Winther, owner and operator of Birchwood Family Medicine, spoke at the protest on Wednesday, sharing her thoughts on targeting waste, fraud and abuse as the justification behind the cuts.

“I don’t know anybody that sits at home and gets Medicaid or ForwardHealth and doesn’t work if they’re not actually medically disabled,” she said. “And so this whole fallacy about having to make these cuts to deal with fraud, waste, and abuse, it’s nonsense. When you’re actually on the frontlines, you see these people who work, also, 10 hour days in restaurants, in factories, and they can’t afford their care.”

Teresa Kriese, another speaker at the event, also shared her experience with a clinical trial she was a part of to treat a rare and inoperable form of cancer. That clinical trial was defunded as a result of recent cuts to the federal grant programs it relied on, forcing her to search for new treatment options.

“Today 39 percent, more than a third of Americans, will be diagnosed with some form of cancer in their lifetime,” she said. “The breakthroughs that save lives do not appear overnight. They come from decades of sustained funding, scientific collaboration, and the willingness to keep pushing. My survival is proof of what happens when that system works.”

The protest was part of a Statewide Ambulance Tour covering seven cities across Wisconsin over the last three days.