CBS Sunday Morning – Critical condition: The crisis of rural medical care

A whole cross-section of America is now facing the very real risk of having no local hospital to turn to. The causes are varied; the population in some of those towns has dwindled to a size that can’t support a hospital anymore.

In others, the hospitals are either mismanaged or they end up as table scraps in mega-mergers. Medicaid expansion would have helped some stay open, Holmes says, but not all, and even so reimbursement rates are often too low for hospitals to break even. Whatever the cause, the impact on the community is almost always the same:

“The hospital closes, the emergency room dries up, all the other services that went with that – home health, pharmacy, hospice, EMS – they leave town as well, and now you’re left with a medical desert,” said Holmes.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/critical-condition-the-crisis-of-rural-medical-care/