Several have died due to hospital closures since those states refused to expand Medicare - making trips to get emergency healthcare much too long.
Remember when Republicans claimed Obamacare would be death camps? The sick joke is death by denial is the Republican way. Their whole pro-life platform is such a lie. They don’t care about the lives and well being of anyone who’s not a fetus or not rich. When will these people wake up?
Celina became the 11th rural hospital in Tennessee to close in recent years — more than in any state but Texas. Both states have refused to expand Medicaid in a way that covers more of the working poor. Even [some Republicans] now say the decision to not expand Medicaid has added to the struggles of rural health care providers.
…but they still won’t expand it because those lives mean nothing to them.
A health system I used to work for wound up taking ownership, basically buying, a local city hospital. They were days away from closing shop. Most the employees had no idea how bad it was. Individual departments would would talk on and about about all the Revenue they were generating but the fact was they’d drop all these charges, but they were not getting paid.
Medicare and Medicaid do not cover costs. The commercial insurances are relied upon to make up the difference, and self-pay is generally seen as a group that mostly can’t pay. If your Payor Mix is really bad, it only takes a few bad years or just a significant group losing coverage, and then you’re in trouble.
ER’s are money suckers. I know the bills out of them are… horrible. I’ve had them myself, but man the cost to run one… too many people use them as their only standard of care, and I don’t fully blame them because that’s all they got.
Not always true so I guess it depends on the state. Here in Michigan ER’s in many hospitals are the big money makers. I went to the state capital to fight for insurance for CF patients and before I was brought on to talk there were plenty of other groups who were fighting for dollars too. One was a Detroit hospital admin/doc who was talking about how underfunded they were and they needed more money etc. The legislator was apparently expecting this because the same hospital rep had just been bragging earlier that year about how incredibly profitable the ER was and how it funded a bunch of other departments.
So I can see how states with no tax base, no Medicaid, no expanded Medicare have most of their non-megalith hospitals on the edge of bankruptcy all the time. You’re looking at half or more of the populace in these states with no proper coverage.
You may talking about Washington, so in that case it comes down to people not having a normal GP as an option, something that’s ridiculous in a modern country.
It’s true. I cannot speak about every state, especially their Medicaid products. California has one of the worst paying rates in the country I believe, for their Medicaid product. WA and OR are typically generous with theirs, but during hard years they really have to scale back.
So for the systems I am familiar with, the ER was a money losing department. They also acted as Regional Trauma centers, as in they had to be ready, at any given time, to take certain levels of trauma which means that staff has to be ready to go at all times, and round the clock coverage like that isn’t, well cheap. They also could have 8 hour waits, and that wait time is often attributed to people using the ER for non-emergencies.
When I had my accident, I was stuck in the ER for two hours, and then they brought me into like this side room because all the real rooms were taken… that was the middle of a weekday.
I’ve seen the numbers though. I know we were losing at that particular of time. It was clearly a red department but the systems also didn’t really turn people away.
I guess I am not surprised to see free standing rural hospitals go down. They’re often going to have pretty high Medicaid and Self-Pay patients, and like I said, one of ours would been closed in a matter of days… they were floating on bankruptcy.
The thing is, some don’t have medicaid period. It is unreal what awfulness occurs in some Southern states. They hate poorer people. One might actually think it’s a way to kill off the poor and sick quicker - denying not only affordable healthcare, but now… healthcare period.
