60 Minutes - 5/3/2020: The Jobless, Where Did The Money Go?, The State of Texas

Episode Date: May 4, 2020

Rural Texas hospitals and clinics are on the brink of closure, as the state prepares to reopen from coronavirus shutdown. Sharyn Alfonsi reports. Scott Pelley talks to some of the 30 million-plus Americans who have become economic victims of the pandemic.  And Lesley Stahl reports on the problems small farmers are facing. Those stories on this week's "60 Minutes." To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Service fees, exclusions, and terms apply. Instacart. Grocer groceries that over-deliver. The new jobless include graduates starting careers and veteran workers focused on retirement. When was the last time you were unemployed? I was never unemployed. We spoke to those who never imagined losing their job to hear about their prospects and how they're coping. How long before you're broke? Now. Now.

60 Minutes was investigating what happened to a $28 billion government bailout for farmers when the pandemic hit. Farmers and ranchers tell us that if government aid doesn't reach their small and mid-sized farms soon, it'll make it nearly impossible for American farming to stay in the family. It's just hard, Leslie. I worry about my kids. My sons are on the farm, and I worry about them all the time. And your good cholesterol is nice and high.

Elizabeth Ellis is a nurse practitioner. Come out! When we met her, she was tearing around her East Texas farm with her four-legged sidearm named Pistol. Social distancing is built into the landscape here and enforced by barbed wire. But the pandemic has reached Ellis' sparsely populated county, too. I'm so sorry. And she finds herself administering COVID tests in her clinic's parking lot.

I'm Leslie Stahl. I'm Bill Whitaker. I'm Anderson Cooper. I'm Sharon Alfonsi. I'm Scott Pelley. Those stories tonight on 60 Minutes. There are very few things that you can be certain of in life. But you can always be sure the sun will rise each morning.

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and get up to $2,400 in value in your first 13 months. Terms and conditions apply. Visit bmo.com slash viporter to learn more. As May begins, millions of Americans delete another month of calendar events for the job they never expected to lose. They made plans. Graduates entering the hottest economy in a generation, entrepreneurs with their dream in sight,

and workplace veterans tuning their retirement. 30 million Americans have filed for unemployment in six weeks. The people you're about to meet signed up last month for a Philadelphia online job fair. It was just four hours of local businesses with open positions, but 1,300 people waited in chat rooms for a chance. They wonder how fast the economy should open and find themselves in a strange place with hours on their hands and time running out. Philadelphia area residents can meet potential employers tomorrow at a virtual job fair. I actually got the information off of the news. Courtney Clifton logged on and applied

for work in a call center, a long drop from the catering company she built on a dream. Amuse Bouche Cuisine was started in about 2015, right after I graduated culinary school. We started out doing small parties and doing the traditional catering events. Our client list has grown exponentially. And since COVID-19? All of a sudden, my clients were calling and emailing. We have to cancel. We have to postpone. We started losing events like that. And what happened to your business?

We went from six employees to two and now we have none. Her husband is still working in home health care. Courtney applied for a government emergency loan but that hasn't come through. The largest bailout in history has lurched forward. The Small Business Administration's Paycheck Protection bailout was partly cleaned lurched forward. The Small Business Administration's Paycheck Protection bailout was partly cleaned out by big business. Government websites have been overwhelmed. The last time I checked, it was in red at the top of the page, and it said, we are unable to offer any information at this time. Please check back later. But there is no later for your employees.

Unfortunately not. I had tears in my eyes when I had to tell my right-hand woman, who is also a family member, that her only source of income, there was nothing that I could do. Have you been able to get unemployment? I have applied, but I haven't received a response yet. State unemployment offices are jammed. Nationwide, in March, only 14 percent of new applicants had received their first check, according to the public policy research group The Century Foundation. What about your stimulus check?

You should have $1,200 coming from the government. Yeah, that's something that I was definitely looking forward to, and my husband actually has an app that allows you to see your mail that's coming to you. So I've seen a picture of the envelope that has the check, but I actually haven't received it yet in the mail. How long before you're broke? Now. Now.

Tim Yabor also heard about last month's job fair on the news. My boss said, do you have a couple of minutes to talk on Zoom? And that's when it happened. In those couple of minutes on Zoom, Yabor, 55, was laid off after decades in sales for hotels and then a convention center. When was the last time you were unemployed? I was never unemployed. This is the first time.

Yabor's wife still has a job in insurance, and she's working from home. What keeps you up at night? That my kids will ask me for money, that before I would just give them money. I worry that we can make our mortgage, we can have food, and, you know, pay our bills. Have you thought of going to the food bank? Thought and did. I passed by a food bank.

I wasn't as bad as the people that were standing in line. They needed it more than I did. This was the need in Philadelphia on Thursday. For the pandemic, the city helped set up 40 food lines, open every Monday and Thursday. Thank you, ma'am. 32,000 boxes of groceries a week. Sure.

Some of those in line these days are the kind of workers Robin Barbicane has helped in her long career. I'm a human resources executive, so I've coached hundreds of people, maybe thousands of people through the process. What is your advice? Typically what I tell them the first thing is to, you know, realize that you have to look at this as a full-time job and you have to work at it every single day. Have you been able to take your own advice? I've tried. There are good days and there are bad days. The bad days started with her layoff in March. She applied at the online job fair for the kind of position she held a decade ago. What does a bad day look like? Well, I'm a mom, so a bad day can't really be a bad day. You have to, you know, you have to kind of be the rock to hold the family together. You have to hold everything together for your kids. So there's not a lot of time to take a moment.

Her family would feel more confident, she told us, if politicians showed more leadership and less partisan bickering. The kids are watching. And, you know, they're watching the adults lose their minds and go crazy and fight over ridiculous things, and it's awful. It's really hard to try to think that, you know, what's the future going to be for our kids? And will that future be undermined, she wonders, if the economy doesn't open, and soon? Definitely we have to balance public safety and health. But at the same token, we have to look at what's going to happen to our economy. And, you know, are we going to completely cripple our society from being in financial ruin?

I think that's really, really scary to be part of that and be caught up in that and worry about what's going to happen to your family. Many families were anticipating graduation season, sending sons and daughters into the best economy in a generation. Reed Hensel graduated in December with a job in hand, which vanished. Are you back with your parents? So I'm actually living with my girlfriend's parents right now, and with her and her family. What's it like living there?

I've been trying to work around the house, help as much as I possibly can, so I'm avoiding that freeloading. Nearly 4 million students are due to graduate this spring into an economy that shrank at a rate of nearly 5% in the first quarter, the worst since the Great Recession. Every day it's going on to LinkedIn or Indeed or Glassdoor, reaching out, having a cover letter ready, a resume already made up. How many have you applied for? Around 25 or so. And you have answers from how many? Zero. Wall Street and government economists estimate the economy will shrink in the second

quarter at a rate near 40 percent, rivaling the Great Depression. Sometimes you get up and you have, you know, three, four, sometimes seven or eight. We're not going to move forward with you in this position. We have someone else who's more qualified. Erin McHale was director of sales for a major telecom. She's back in the job market after running her own consulting shop. She took a shot at Philadelphia's online job fair. Each company that was part of the job fair had a window, a room, what they called it, so you could go into

the room, see what jobs they had open, and decide to get in line. Once you got connected with a recruiter, you had about four minutes to tell them who you were, what you were looking for, and learn a little bit about their company. They gave you a time limit? Yes, and you could see the clock counting down. Her goal is 10 applications a day. Some positions that I've applied for, they question why I'm applying for the job. Because... I'm overqualified for that position.

You would take those jobs? Yes, I have to do what I have to do right now. Especially since neither unemployment insurance nor the stimulus check have come through. We were told that help was on the way. I haven't gotten it yet. The U.S. Treasury says about 80% of households have been issued stimulus checks, including the home of Selena Temple, who had been a paralegal in law offices for 20 years. I got a telephone call from the office manager. She said that the office would be closing indefinitely, and that basically was it. Two weeks after that, I received a letter that my health insurance would be terminated at the end of March.

Do you have any health issues? I do, yes. Yes, I have suffered with low iron for a long time, and it caused damage to my heart, and I actually was in the hospital in November. Nearly 13 million Americans likely lost their health insurance with their jobs, according to research by the Economic Policy Institute. I cannot get the medicine because I don't have health insurance.

I can't follow up with my primary doctor because I can't pay for a visit. Despite heart trouble, she was working full-time and studying. She's three classes away from an MBA. Her son is graduating, too, but tuition bills have left her with loans to pay. What do your student debts come to? They are somewhere in the neighborhood of $300,000. That includes my son's education as well. How are you going to make those payments? I have no idea. It actually terrifies me. I try not to focus on that because the thought process can be really dark during those times. You're the first person in your family to graduate college, and now your son and daughter have gone on to higher education.

How does the American dream feel to you? It doesn't feel like a dream at all. I used to go to the grocery store maybe once a week, and I would spend anywhere between $100 to $150 during my trip. Now it's a challenge because I spend about $20, $25 a week as opposed to $100, $150 and make it work. Courtney Clifton, the catering company owner, hasn't heard back on that call center job. Like the others who spoke with us, she longs to know what her new world will look like and when she will see it. I thank God that my husband has a job that will allow us to at least pay our rent.

But that's it. My business was my sole income. How do you imagine your catering business coming back? I'm not sure. Because not only am I going to have to wait until they open up the state, which is this, you know, so many steps plan. Once they open the state, then I have to wait for people to feel comfortable enough to start going out in public again.

And then I have to wait until people are comfortable enough to start planning events with people gathering together. And the only thing keeping me going? My husband and my faith in God. Wendy's most important deal of the day has a fresh lineup. Pick any two breakfast items for $4. New four-piece French toast sticks, bacon or sausage wrap, biscuit or English muffin sandwiches, small hot coffee, and more. Limited time only at participating Wendy's Taxes Extra. Sometimes historic events suck.

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including the Hoover Dam, the Empire State Building, the Golden Gate Bridge, and more. The promise is in the title, History That Doesn't Suck, available on the free Odyssey app or wherever you get your podcasts. Over the coming months, the government will disburse a $19 billion bailout package for farmers hurt by the coronavirus pandemic. To understand who would benefit from this new bailout, we took a close look at another recent bailout for farmers, the $28 billion program administered without congressional oversight over

the last two years and meant to offset damages from President Trump's trade war with China. We wanted to know where did the money go? Well, as it turns out, most of it bypassed the country's traditional small and medium-sized farms that were battered by the loss of their export market and which are now being hit with severe losses from the coronavirus pandemic. South Dakota is soybean, corn and wheat country. And right now it's reeling. If people are really wanting to jump off a building about what the stock market's doing, we've been doing that for three years now. We did everything right. We raised great crops, but we're still losing our rear ends because of what's happening with the sanctions. And now with the coronavirus, it's going to be another hit, without a doubt.

So imagine three years ago, you lost 30 percent of your paycheck. And then the next year, you lost another 30 percent. I mean, that's the pain we're feeling. When we bought that, we talked to the salesman. Doug Sompke and Bob Kylan oversee the farmers' unions in North and South Dakota with more than 50,000 farmers and livestock producers. The average farm here is less than 1,500 acres. Can you hear me? Is this okay, this level? We interviewed them remotely. What is happening to your farmers with this virus? It's just

accelerating the problem. And we are not being able to sell because everyone's worried if the plants are going to stay open. And restaurants closing? Yeah, the food is starting to back up. The freezers are getting full. Restaurants aren't buying. So, yeah, it's really becoming a huge issue for us. With restaurants and schools closed across the country, their markets are shrinking. It's adding to already rising debt and farm bankruptcies aggravated by the trade war with China. They told us the bailout, called the Market Facilitation Program, that began in 2018, helped them survive the last two years, but didn't come close to covering most of their members' losses or their own.

How did the tariffs, the sanctions, affect you? About $70,000 a year I lost in the last couple of years. On our farm, we've lost, in the last three years years roughly $125,000 to $200,000 a year. But what about the bailouts? You had two rounds. This was supposed to tide you over. Yeah. Did it?

Well, it made the banker happy. It didn't do anything for me. We've seen reports of suicides going up among farmers. Oh yeah, I know personally families that are suffering through that. The stress is out there now. It's just, they're out there for four or five generations of their family and they're the ones that lost the farm. What do you think that's going to do to their mind? Yeah, a lot of depression. And just this last year in my hometown, we've lost three young men to suicide.

It's just hard, Leslie, because you see these young guys coming up and you coach them in baseball. You had hopes that you're glad they stayed in the community, and then you end up seeing this happen. And none of their fault, not any of their fault. It's hard. And I worry about my kids. My sons are on the farm, and I worry about them all the time.

After President Trump imposed the stringent tariffs in 2018, China struck back hard here in the farm belt, imposing its own steep tariffs, especially impacting soybeans, our largest agricultural export to China, and sending commodity prices into a freefall. The administration tapped a Depression-era fund for agriculture and provided $28 billion for farmers, almost $3 billion to purchase surpluses for food banks and other nutrition programs, and more than $24 billion in direct aid to farmers. We will ensure that our farmers get the relief they need, and very, very quickly. It's a good time to be a farmer. We're going to make sure of that. But so far, most of the money has gone to the biggest farms, one third of it to just four percent of them. Even farm owners who personally report nearly one million dollars in income per year are eligible. We spoke to Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue in March

in the early days of the pandemic, before social distancing was the norm. He defended the trade war bailout and the payments to farmers that were based on the amount of crops produced in 2018 and by planted acreage in 2019. It's not a welfare program. It's not a subsidy. It's not a price support system. It is a market damage system, a disruption there. These payments are disproportionately going to the big, wealthy farms at the expense of the smaller farms where the suffering is.

The fact is, Leslie, most of our production in America is done by large farmers. That's just the way it happens. These are awards based on production, but we did try. We've got payment limits that cut people off. But the payment limits don't always cut people off. The limit, or the cap, designed specifically for the biggest operators used to be $125,000 per person or legal entity. But that was raised last year to $250,000. But why did you double the cap, the limit? When we saw the amount of trade damage that was happening here, the need was out there in order to keep these farmers

where they could continue not be made whole, but continue to survive to farm again the next year. They made changes for the very largest farmers. If you're a small farmer, you don't have to worry about the limits. You're going to not come close to hitting them. But large farmers, they changed it so that a husband could get $250,000, his wife could get $250,000. Ken Cook is the president of the Environmental Working Group

that's been tracking farm subsidies for decades and now the direct payments to farmers under the Trump administration's bailout. The USDA data Cook obtained through a search of public records show farms are actually collecting millions of dollars way over the cap. They do it by exploiting permissive eligibility rules that the administration adopted from Congress's farm bills. Those rules allow big farms to collect maximum payments on behalf of not just the farmer, but many others. Cousins, uncles, aunts. So let's say I have a cousin who's

a farmer and I'm a reporter in New York. I sit here. I don't do any farming, but I'm a cousin. That's right. I can get money. You can get money. Maybe you have to make a phone call a couple of times a year. But I don't have to even go there? No, you don't have to live on the farm or visit the farm. These payments aren't just going to farmers who are out there climbing up on a tractor every morning. These payments are going to people who are living in the middle of New York City because they happen to have an ownership interest in the farm.

Many farms today have investors, call them absentee owners, who also collect bailout money. When we checked, we found hundreds of recipients living in big cities, including New York City, Miami, San Francisco. Among them, a banker, an architect, a composer, a classical musician. Not South Dakota's Doug Sompke's idea of a farmer. I mean, my sons are the ones out here working. They're the ones that should get the money. If you've got dirt under your fingernails, you're the ones that should be getting the money. Nobody else.

But doesn't the money come to the farm? No, it can go anywhere. They can distribute it as the corporation sees fit, right? If you're a very large farm operation and you're eligible for these payments, the most important tool as a farmer is not what's in your machine shed, it's the lawyer you hire, to set up a paper farm that's designed to absorb as much federal money, as much Trump payment as possible. And there are lawyers who are documenting these family owners? There are lawyers who specialize in helping big farms maximize their payments from the Department of Agriculture. It's an industry in and of itself, and they do very well. Lawyers like Robert Serio, who for years have been making the most of the loopholes in farm subsidy policy, and now the Trump administration's bailout.

Do you know the nickname that you have? Not really. It's Loophole. They call you Loophole. Somebody else would call me the Cap Doctor. The Cap Doctor. The Cap Doctor. Sarrio is based here in Clarendon, Arkansas, a tiny town with one sit-down restaurant where he knows everybody.

How many farmers do you have in here today? He has more than 250 clients in 25 states that he says are all actively engaged in farming. Serio represents the Deline Farming Operations. They include three partnerships that USDA data show are registered to the same address in Missouri, which in total collected more than $5 million in the bailout so far, way more than the cap. These aren't loopholes. They are designed regulations. All I did was follow a trail that the government laid out for me.

Well, no one is saying it's illegal. Nobody. No. If that farm is a partnership, how much can they get if there are 20 people in the partnership? Do they still only get $250,000? Come on. They get $250,000 times 20, right?

If they earn it, if that land that they're farming earns that money. Let's say it earned the money, but there's only one person, and they then get... I would say to that one person, he needs to come and see me because he's not running a very economical farming operation. So I've come to you. What do you do?

What do you advise me to do? First thing I would do, ask you if you were married. And if your answer is yes, I would say, then you need to form a husband and wife partnership. That would be my first advice. Secondly, if you're even bigger than that, I might ask you, do you have any children who are working on the farm? And if their answer is yes, then I would tell them how to be able to use that child to enhance that, the cash flow for that partnership I'm going to form. And your farming operation will be, have more eligibility and enhance your cash flow, make you more profitable. Everybody will benefit from that. What's the largest partnership you ever formed?

66 partners. 66. That's a lot. Remember, this is taxpayer money. Secretary Perdue said if farmers are exploiting weak subsidy laws to get money, they shouldn't. It's Congress's fault. What I'm telling you, Leslie, is that we use the same criteria as Congress passed in the Farm Bill to determine who is eligible to receive money and who is not. That's the fact.

We are administrators of the law passed by Congress. But let me ask you, as a Secretary of Agriculture, if you think that's a good idea, to allow those partnerships to exist i think again it really is the responsibility of congress to determine this from my perspective as administrator my job is to follow the law hit pause on whatever you're listening to and hit play on your next adventure. Stay three nights this summer at Best Western and get $50 off a future stay. Life's a trip. Make the most of it at Best Western.

Visit bestwestern.com for complete terms and conditions. The state of Texas has three of the biggest cities in America, but it's not suffered the same number of COVID-19 infections as other large states. As of Friday, Texas was ranked ninth. But Texas also ranks near the bottom when it comes to the percentage of residents it's tested, and that worries some doctors and nurses, especially those in rural areas of the state. Many small hospitals and clinics around the country are fearful they don't have the staff and budget to survive the pandemic.

Among those trying to prop up the system in Texas is Sid Miller, the commissioner of agriculture who wears many hats. He came to our interview wearing a custom-made white one. Well, I'm the commissioner of agriculture because we oversee cows, plows, and sows, but I'm also the Commissioner of the State Office of Rural Health. So we're trying to keep 163 rural hospitals open from going out of business. Any sense of how many rural hospitals are at risk right now in Texas? Well, of the 163 we have, 60 of them have less than 30 days cash on hand. Whoa.

Yeah, some of them. Actually, we had one filing for bankruptcy this week. The hospital. In Alpine, Texas. And the parent company are filing for bankruptcy. Did this push them over the edge, the COVID? Yes, it pushed them over the edge. And I'm afraid this pandemic, we're going to continue to lose health care providers in rural Texas and across the nation.

Low reimbursement rates and high numbers of uninsured patients have forced 128 hospitals that served 6 million people across the nation to close in the last decade. 21 hospitals were in Texas, more than any other state. That's left one out of five rural Texas counties without a doctor. Elizabeth Ellis is a nurse practitioner. When we met her, she was tearing around her East Texas farm with her four-legged sidearm named Pistol. The medicine's doing its job. Everything's perfect. I wouldn't change a thing. The clinic she owns is in Beat Eyes, Texas,

population 443. Lately, her job includes administering COVID-19 tests in the clinic parking lot. Has coronavirus reached out here? Yes, it has reached Grimes County. That's shocking. You know, driving through here, I definitely saw more cows than people. A lot of our community members have to leave the county for jobs. That puts them at risk. So it was inevitable that at some point in time it was going to hit the county. So far, Grimes County has reported 19 COVID cases and one death. The county is about an hour and a half northwest of Houston. 400,000 acres of it is covered with farms and ranches. Social distancing is built into the landscape and enforced by barbed wire. Tell me what the challenge is of providing health care in a rural community like this. We have larger elderly population and they have sometimes 10,

sometimes 12, even 20 chronic disease states and comorbid conditions. They're poor, predominantly on Medicaid. I have a tremendous agricultural group of farmers and families that are in the gap. They can't afford insurance. When you say in the gap, what do you mean by that? They are not quite poor enough to be on Medicaid, and they don't make enough money to yet afford insurance. So as we're talking about coronavirus, we know the elderly are at higher risk.

We know people with preexisting conditions are at higher risk. And that's this community. It is this community. I want you to try and do a little bit of walking. Go outside, walk the property just a little bit, okay? Now, many of those patients are too afraid to go to the clinic. Others simply can't get there. For many of these people, transportation is a liability.

They don't have it. Or they can't drive. They're elderly, they have conditions, and they can't drive. Increasingly, Ellis' rounds require a full tank of gas. She negotiates dusty roads to check up on patients at their homes. How are y'all? Good, how are you? So if you get a bunch of coronavirus cases, if there's some kind of community spread here, what happens?

What do you do? I'm going to be overwhelmed. And what frightens me is that all of America's critical access hospitals, especially here in Texas, are at risk of closing. Critical access hospitals are the health care outposts many rural communities rely on. The drive to an emergency room can take an hour or more. I take care of people I went to school with, their parents. I take care of former teachers. They may go to the same school as my kids. They may go to my gym. And so we just, we know everyone. Dr. Leanne Falcon is one of 10 full-time doctors at Memorial Medical Center in Calhoun County. It serves 26,000 people on the Gulf Coast of Texas.

Take some deep breaths. Dr. Falcon also runs a clinic just down the street. You hear about rural health care in Texas and it being such a dire situation here and hospitals closing and doctors leaving. Why? Why is it so bad in Texas? We lead the nation in a lot of things and including uninsured. So about nine percent of people are uninsured across the country, give or take. And in Texas, it's more than double that. Our little hospital down the street on any given year can provide up to six million dollars in uncompensated care. And it's hard to run a business when you're giving away $6 million a year.

And this year, the pandemic has pushed Calhoun County's hospital further into the red. Like many states preparing for the pandemic, Texas canceled non-essential medical procedures for 30 days to expand hospital capacity around the state. Things like colonoscopies and lab services that usually make up half the revenue at the state's rural hospitals. We're just going to check your temperature is 97.9. When we visited Calhoun County's hospital, there were no COVID patients, but few other patients either. We noticed the ER was silent and most beds were empty, partly because fear of the virus is discouraging people from going to the ER.

An administrator told us they were down to seven days worth of cash. Revenue from elective procedures, a primary moneymaker for the hospital, has almost disappeared. Can, you know, the hospitals, the clinics survive this? Without assistance, they won't survive. And if our hospital were to close, it would devastate our community. It would be horrible. How so? Well, first of all, there's just a lack of care.

Again, we're already short physicians. We're short for health care. If you have an emergency and the nearest emergency room is over 35 miles away, that's not a good thing. Dr. Falcon, a single mother of three, has started skipping paychecks to pay her staff. And there's another problem. Doctors and nurses must treat every patient like they may have COVID-19. Now they're running low on personal protective equipment. It's empty. It's empty. Yeah, and I never thought I would see that. A nurse told us they are reusing masks and mixing their own cleaning supplies.

The number of COVID-19 cases is still rising in their county. Last week, it was up to 30. And preparing for the possibility of more is further draining the budget. Our hospital is financially struggling on a good day. So now this normal equipment, which we'd probably pay, what, a dollar for, 50 cents for, and now we're paying 20 times that. It's just crazy. Are you? Or the price has gone up that much? Yeah, so usually the masks

like we're wearing, or like Dr. Falcon's wearing, we pay about six cents each normally. We're paying up to $1.20 each now. Lately, Sid Miller, the agriculture commissioner who oversees a $680 million state budget, has taken to delivering hand sanitizer in the back of his truck, loading it up in Austin, driving it to the country. I think a lot of people think because some areas of Texas are so rural and so remote that COVID won't affect them, won't bother them. There's natural social distancing. Well, you know, that's simply not true. The single hottest spot in the United States is in South Dakota, of all places.

You know, we had a beef packing plant up there. I think the last count I saw was like 650 cases in that one town where those, you know, area of South Dakota. So that dog won't hunt. It just doesn't hold true. After we spoke to Miller, a similar hotspot surfaced nearly nine hours from Austin at a meatpacking plant in a city called Cactus in the Texas Panhandle. More than 350 people have tested positive and three died in surrounding Moore County, which now has the highest COVID infection rate in the state. The sole 25-bed

hospital in the county only had two ventilators. The CEO of the hospital used his four-seater plane to pick up two more ventilators, and the state supplied another three. The one thing that's limited on these rural hospitals is ventilators. Some of them may have one, some of them may have two. We've had to go back in and dig out those that are in storage, you know, and refurbish them and get them ready. So we still don't quite have a handle on the ventilators in these rural hospitals. In March, he asked the Texas governor for $40 million to prop up rural health care centers during the pandemic,

arguing if the hospitals fail, the communities will too. When a hospital closes up, the manufacturing leaves too, because they have to have health care. You have to have three things. You have to have a financial institution, you have to have health care, and you have to have a church. If you don't have any of those three, the community starts to dry up. On Monday, Texas Governor Greg Abbott announced he was allowing his stay-at-home order to expire and some Texas businesses to reopen. That executive order has done its job to slow the growth of COVID-19.

Three days later, Texas had its single highest number of COVID deaths in a day with 50. Abbott is now prioritizing testing in rural communities. But he has not publicly said whether he'll grant any additional funding to rural clinics and declined our requests for an interview. Being younger and naive, I guess I just never realized during times like this when something would happen how much we would really have to rely on ourselves and kind of cowboy up and do things our own. In March, Congress approved $100 billion for hospitals.

And in April, President Trump signed a relief package that promised another $75 billion. But so far, the hospital in Calhoun County, Texas, has received about $600,000 of aid, which they say will cover three weeks payroll. And nurse practitioner Elizabeth Ellis has received a total of $800. On Friday afternoon, the Trump administration promised to rush $10 billion specifically for rural health care providers. Nurse Ellis told us she'll believe it when she sees it. Right now, you know, I'm losing $10,000 plus. $10,000 a month?

Yes. This is my retirement. I'm using my retirement. No one would blame you if you said, I've had enough, I can't keep digging into my retirement. Why don't you? Because I believe in what we are doing with my heart. We will do our best to maintain, but it won't last for very long. I'm at risk every day right now of having to make that difficult decision. One of the rules of journalism is don't

become part of the story. But instead of covering the pandemic, I was one of the more than one million Americans who did become part of it. I wasn't alone from this broadcast. One COVID-positive 60 Minutes co-worker had almost no symptoms, while others had almost every symptom you can imagine. Each case is different. After two weeks at home in bed, weak, fighting pneumonia, and really scared, I went to the hospital. I found an overworked, nearly overwhelmed staff. Every one of them was kind and sympathetic, gentle and caring from the moment I arrived until the moment days later when I was wheeled out through a gauntlet of cheering medical workers. In the face of so much death, they celebrate their triumphs. This valiant army in scrubs and masks were not just doing a job. They were fulfilling a mission, answering the call. Thanks to them, like so many other patients, I am well now.

Tonight, we owe them our gratitude, our admiration, and in some cases, our lives. I'm Leslie Stahl. We'll be back next week with another edition of 60 Minutes.