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Thursday, April 13th, 2017

In the Tennessee Delta, a poor community loses its hospital — and sense of security

Author:     Amy Goldstein
Source:     The Washington Post
Publication Date:     April 11 at 10:08 AM
 Link: In the Tennessee Delta, a poor community loses its hospital — and sense of security
Stephan:   Consider this: 64% of Americans, particularly those people who live in the Red value states in the middle of the country and in the south, have never travelled outside the U.S. borders, and many rarely even leave their own area. Perhaps that explains why our shoddy illness profit system survives. Over half the country have nothing with which to compare it. But a confluence of trends are coming together to make the failure of our profit model healthcare even more obvious. Throughout the country little rural for-profit hospitals are closing. Why? They're not profitable enough. Also the immigrant doctors and nurses who constitute such a large percentage of the staff at those hospitals are no longer coming to the U.S.. If you are an elderly person, or someone with the chronic health problem, the closure of these rural hospitals may mean the difference between you living or dying if an emergency comes up. Here's the story.

Haywood Park Community Hospital in Brownsville, Tenn., closed three years ago, and the sign over its main entrance is covered in black paint. Plywood remains nailed up inside its sliding glass doors.
Credit: Michael S. Williamson/The Washington Post

This town of the Tennessee Delta, seat of a county that once grew the most cotton east of the Mississippi, relied for decades on a little public hospital built during the Great Depression a few blocks from the courthouse square.

The red-brick building was knocked down in the 1970s when a for-profit chain came along and opened a modern stucco hospital on the north side of town. There, thousands of babies were born, pneumonias and failing hearts were treated and the longtime family doctor across the parking lot could wheel the sickest patients who arrived at his office right into the emergency room.

But these days, plywood boards are nailed up behind the hospital’s sliding glass entrances. Black paint is smudged across signs over its doorways. The nearest ER is more than a […]

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1 Comment

  1. Rev. Dean on Thursday, April 13, 2017 at 7:33 am

    That sounds like my county here in Pa. We had two hospitals when I moved back here from Florida back in 1990. Then the main city hospital ran short of money, and so did the Catholic hospital which was our favorite and only one block away. The main hospital got “rescued” by being taken over be U.P.M.C. (University of Pittsburgh Medical Center) which also took over the Catholic hospital and very quickly closed it. The main hospital charge an outrageous amount for their over-night stays and are more than most regular families can bear to pay. So the poor just die in their own homes when a real problem occurs. The rich go to the main hospital (now U.P.M.C.) and are flown by helicopter to Pittsburg for any care that is beyond the capacity of those doctors at the main hospital. That is another example of inequality at work in our dismal country, and I find it disgusting. A single payer option which covers hospital stays more like Medicaid does, rather than Medicare which only covers 80% of the hospital stay is necessary for those less fortunate to stay alive. I know I will die in my home. I will not go to the overpriced U.P.M.C. main hospital.