Hundreds of rural hospitals are at risk of closing, threatening critical care

Losing a agrarian ER tin mean beingness oregon decease

In agrarian America, losing a infirmary is simply a beingness oregon decease risk 02:50

Hundreds of hospitals successful agrarian parts of the United States are successful information of closing due to the fact that they tin nary longer spend to enactment open, according to a caller study from the Center for Healthcare Quality and Payment Reform. The main reason: Insurance companies wage them overmuch little than their large metropolis counterparts for the aforesaid services.

In Trinity, Texas, astir 90 miles northbound of Houston, Midcoast Medical Center precocious had to adjacent its doors.

"It has a immense interaction connected the community. We volition suffer lives. Four 100 radical a period travel here," Marjory Pulvino, who runs the hospital's board, told CBS News.

In the East Texas Piney Woods, Midcoast was much than a building. It was a lifeline wherever babies were calved and wherever the bosom of Cathy Courtney's 90-year-old hubby was restarted, redeeming his life.

Courtney said she and her hubby had utilized the installation "about six times successful the past 14 months."

Midcoast officials told CBS News the closure was driven by the aforesaid factors that person closed different agrarian hospitals: debased reimbursement rates from aged patients' Medicare and Medicaid coverage, which made up astir of the hospital's budget.

Hospitals successful municipality areas, meanwhile, get importantly much reimbursement from their patients who person backstage insurance, which tends to wage more.

Republicans' projected cuts to Medicaid could permission much than 8.5 cardinal radical uninsured, according to the Congressional Budget Office, and unit adjacent much agrarian hospitals to close.

The Center for Healthcare Quality and Payment Reform's report found that 742 agrarian hospitals are astatine hazard of closing, with implicit 300 of those being classified arsenic being astatine "immediate risk."

Courtney's hubby is present location and doing well, but the 87-year-old said she worries that if there's different emergency, they won't marque it to the nearest infirmary present that Midcoast is closed. 

While Midcoast was a 10-minute drive, the closest aesculapian halfway is present much than fractional an hr away, Courtney said.