Three decades ago, a small group of advocates in Mt. Sterling opened the doors of the Post Clinic with a simple mission: expanding access to primary medical and dental care for Kentuckians who couldn’t afford it. Three decades later, that mission is still alive in every exam room.
I’ve watched this clinic grow up close. Back in 2022, I secured a $1 million federal grant that empowered the Post Clinic build a new facility — funding that, paired with local and state support, helped the clinic expand its reach from roughly 400 patients a year to as many as 4,000 across Montgomery, Bath, and the surrounding counties. That’s not a number on a spreadsheet. That’s thousands of our friends, coworkers, and family members who now have somewhere to go when they need care — Kentuckians who might otherwise have gone without care altogether.
I think back to what Mt. Sterling Mayor Al Botts said the day we broke ground on that expansion: it took local, state, and federal leaders all pulling in the same direction, because a healthy Montgomery County starts with making sure everyone has access to a doctor. He was right then, and he’s still right today. Thirty years of the Post Clinic is proof of what this community can build when it refuses to let its neighbors fall through the cracks.
This anniversary also comes at an important time for rural healthcare here at home. Clinics and hospitals in small towns like ours are stretched thin — competing for nurses and doctors, working with aging buildings, and trying to serve wide, spread-out communities without the resources a big city hospital has.
That’s a fight I’ve taken seriously in Washington. I helped write reforms to the Medicaid program that will ensure dollars are going where they should be: to Kentuckians who need Medicaid. We also established the $50B Rural Health Transformation Program, which will target federal support to Kentucky over the next five years to help rural providers like the Post Clinic modernize, recruit and keep good clinicians, and bring new tools like telehealth to patients who’d otherwise have to drive an hour for care.
But no program out of Washington replaces what happens here in Mt. Sterling every day — volunteers, donors, local physicians, and a dedicated staff showing up for their neighbors. My job is to make sure they have the resources to keep doing it. That means continuing to back facilities like the Post Clinic, and making sure Montgomery County gets its fair share of the new rural health funding coming to Kentucky.
The founders who opened those doors thirty years ago built something that’s now cared for three generations of local families. Here’s to making sure the next thirty years are just as strong.
Happy 30th anniversary to the Post Clinic. Montgomery County is healthier because of you.
U.S. Congressman Andy Barr (R-KY-06) represents Montgomery County in the U.S. House of Representatives.