Stephan: Outside of large metropolitan areas the illness profit system that passes for healthcare in America is breaking down. There's not enough profit to be made in rural communities and since the system is not really about healthcare the obvious solution is to close down rural hospitals. Too bad about the people who live in those communities, but they are not profitable enough.
Also the immigration restrictions of the Trump administration are discouraging immigrant physicians and nurses, who are disproportionately represented at those rural hospitals, from coming to America. No wonder the U.S. healthcare outcome data is so shabby.
You want a taste of data to make sure I'm telling the truth? Just take infant and maternal mortality, and try that on for size:
The U.S. rate of 6.1 infant deaths per 1,000 live births masks considerable state-level variation. If Alabama were a country, its rate of 8.7 infant deaths per 1,000 would place it slightly behind Lebanon in the world rankings. Mississippi, with its 9.6 deaths, would be somewhere between Botswana and Bahrain.
More American women are dying of pregnancy-related complications than any other developed country. Only in the U.S. has the rate of women who die been rising. What does that look like compared to say Canada: 26.4 maternal deaths per 100,000 births. In CANADA it's 7.3 deaths per 100,000 births.
So where would you like to have your baby?
Crystal Harris was at her Virginia home one winter afternoon when she received a 911 call.
As an unpaid volunteer of the Smith River Rescue Squad in Woolwine, a small town located in northern Patrick County, Harris needed to drop what she was doing and head to the nearest ambulance station, a trip that normally takes about 10 minutes.
“Then you would respond to the house, which could take anywhere around 15 minutes,” Harris, the captain for advanced life support on the squad, told CNBC. If necessary, the rescue team would then take the patient to the nearest hospital, about 45 minutes to one hour east in Martinsville.
Harris could have taken the patient to the much closer 25-bed Pioneer Community Hospital of Patrick in Stuart, where she had been an employee before she retired. But the hospital filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy and closed last year, leaving more than 100 people without a job and the roughly 19,000 residents in the surrounding community without a nearby emergency health facility.
Harris, 72, now spends most of her days responding to 911 calls. […]
