Stephan: The pandemic has made it clear just how inadequate the American illness profit system is. But within that failure and inadequacy, there is a special sector, rural hospitals, that stand out for the menace of their crisis. There are three issues going on in rural medicine: 1) Hospitals are closing all over the country because in a system based entirely on profit, they are profitable enough. 2) Rural hospitals are largely staffed by immigrant physicians and nurses and, because of Trump's racist immigration policies, fewer and fewer are coming to the U.S., so rural hospitals are understaffed, and in some cases closing because they can't get enough staff. 3) Rural hospitals have been, as this report from Kaiser Health News lays out, severely impacted by pandemic loans they have received and must repay.
If you live in a largely rural state, particularly if the ACA is overturned by the Supreme Court as Trump and your Republican Congressional members are trying to make happen, there is a very high probability that by this time next year you will have a level of health care one would see in a developing nation not a first-world democracy nation. You better think about that when you go in to vote.
Large red EMERGENCY sign on hospital entrance. Credit: Raw original.
David Usher is sitting on $1.7 million he’s scared to spend.
The money lent from the federal government is meant to help hospitals and other health care providers weather the COVID-19 pandemic. Yet some hospital administrators have called it a payday loan program that is now, brutally, due for repayment at a time when they still need help.
Coronavirus cases have “picked up recently and it’s quite worrying,” said Usher, chief financial officer at the 12-bed Edwards County Medical Center in rural western Kansas. Usher said he would like to use the money to build a negative-pressure room, a common strategy to keep contagious patients apart from those in the rest of the hospital.
But he’s not sure it’s safe to spend that cash. Officially, the total repayment of the loan is due this month. Otherwise, according to the loan’s terms, federal regulators will stop reimbursing the hospitals for Medicare patients’ treatments until the loan is repaid in full.
The federal Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services has not yet begun […]
To me, it is the federal government which should be paying for all the Corona Virus bills because it looks like Trump’s fault that we are in this mess because of his inaction in the start when he knew it was coming since January.
To me, it is the federal government which should be paying for all the Corona Virus bills because it looks like Trump’s fault that we are in this mess because of his inaction in the start when he knew it was coming since January.