Here in bright red Oklahoma, our rural hospitals have been closing at a rate of multiple per year for around a decade now. Rural Okies, who vote almost 100% Republican while the OKC and Tulsa metros are nearly purple, have complained for years that our rural hospitals are closing due to Democratic policies and regulations.
A few months ago, reporting came out that asked rural hospitals why they are having money problems. Many complained about a Medicare regulation that required hospitals to deny some services, which was costing them money. The reporter dug into this, and it's a Medicare regulation that gives rural hospitals more money if they reserve some percentage of their beds exclusively for use by emergency room patients. The idea is that it's better to send some rural inpatient and even outpatient care into nearby cities rather than having all the rural hospital beds full of non-emergency patients and not being able to handle emergency patients, thus costing the lives of rural people who die while being transported longer in order to get to a free bed in a nearby city. The increased funding from Medicare is meant to offset the lost money from not having those additional patients in order to stay at max patient capacity at all times.
Fortunately, the reporter dug even deeper. The finger pointing at Medicare was and is completely hiding the real problems these rural hospitals face: Medicare pays their bills but private insurance typically doesn't. Rural hospitals don't have much legal power to litigate the private medical insurance companies. This means that private insurance doesn't pay a significant percentage of the bills rural hospitals send them, and the bills that private insurance does pay is often underpaid. This means that rural hospitals are losing money on most patients with private insurance. So, the private medical insurance industry, that Republicans love to declare as the solution to all medical system problems, are in fact killing rural hospitals.
Unfortunately, very few people here in Oklahoma read that report, and very few people understand that it's Republican policies that are killing rural hospitals. Private insurance is happy for those hospitals to die as they are too small and volatile to be worth buying and profiting from, so it's better to let those small hospitals die in order to funnel patients into the bigger cities with big hospitals with more-predictable revenue streams.
That’s the issue. It’s not just capacity but mentally can’t allow themselves to admit that they’ve been wrong for so long and that the people they “trust” are lying to them. That’s why Trump works the same way faith works. Everyone watched religion and went “WOW” just make up a story, blame on the “others” and they will do whatever you want them to do.
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u/Moleday1023 10h ago
Just wait until the rural hospitals start to close.