Challenges to rural healthcare
Dear Editor:
A person’s ZIP code should not dictate their life expectancy or the quality of healthcare they can receive.
Like many people, I chose to live and raise my children in rural Western Colorado because of the quality of life it could provide, free from big city problems like crime, traffic, noise and the rest. What I didn’t count on was that that decision could put my and my children’s health at risk – not from pollution or the risk of crime, but from lack of access to a hospital within a reasonable distance.
We are all familiar with the skyrocketing costs of health care; my own family’s health insurance premiums continue to go up, which has created a financial burden on us. But those rising costs have had another impact as well, and that is on local hospitals, especially those in rural areas. Many people forget that higher costs and increased demand are putting enormous pressure on hospitals and providers. On top of that, Medicare and Medicaid reimburse hospitals at far below the actual costs of providing care to the patients those programs cover.
The result is that, just as many families are faced with having to choose to give something up in order to afford higher health insurance premiums, so too rural hospitals are placed in the awful position of having to choose what services they can and can’t afford to provide, or to forego investment in new technologies that could improve patient outcomes, just to be able to keep their doors open.
And sadly, a growing number of rural hospitals simply cannot stay open. The country has seen several hospitals close, mostly in rural areas, in recent years, and many more are on the brink. Hospitals treat everyone who comes through their doors, whether they can afford to pay or not, and provide billions of dollars in uncompensated care. As the reimbursements from Medicaid and Medicare keep going down, hospitals end up eating more and more of the costs. This is simply unsustainable.
Thankfully, we are not currently experiencing this threat to our availability to health care in Meeker, but other communities in Western Colorado are not so lucky.
I want to live in a community where I know I will be able to access a good quality hospital should anything happen to me or my family. But the longer our local hospitals are expected to shoulder the financial burden for the entire healthcare industry, the greater chance that we will lose that access.
Respectfully,
Rich Klinzmann
Meeker