Twenty-six % of rural hospitals in Texas are susceptible to closure, in keeping with a report issued late final 12 months by the agency Kaufman Hall. The quantity is up 10% from 2021 and the threat is due partly to pandemic reduction cash operating out.
“If you have a Whole Foods, you’re urban. If you have a Chick-fil-A, you’re suburban. If you have a Dairy Queen, you’re rural. And if you don’t have a restaurant, you’re frontier,” president and CEO of the Texas Organization of Rural and Community Hospitals, John Henderson, mentioned.
The group defines a rural hospital as one in a group of fewer than 60,000 folks. Henderson pointed to a closure in Bowie for example of how essential hospitals should not simply to a metropolis’s well being care, however to its economic system.
“It wasn’t just that the hospital closed and you lost access and lost 100 or more good jobs. It’s that local sales tax revenue dipped by a third the following year, school enrollment dropped. They went through around a teacher layoffs,” he mentioned. “So you see all those cascading economic impacts that are all negative and harmful to a community.”
Dr. Kristie Loescher, assistant dean for educational innovation for the McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas and the tutorial director for the Healthcare Innovation Initiative, mentioned one among the methods rural hospitals could make good choices is by limiting the providers it provides.
For instance, she pointed to an emergency room. Due to a federal legislation, a hospital is required to deal with any affected person who walks by way of its emergency room doorways — whether or not or not they will pay for providers.
“In Austin or Dallas, if a hospital sees a few patients like that, they can absorb it. They can absorb the bad debt. But in a rural situation, they’re living so close to the wire, they don’t have that extra margin to be able to provide the amount of charity care required,” she mentioned.
Host Baylee Friday additionally speaks with the CEO of Muenster Memorial Hospital, Marion Bruce, about the challenges going through her hospital in recent times.
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