Rural hospitals are still reeling from the pandemic

The pandemic "pummeled" rural hospitals, especially those not part of ownership groups, and has made it more difficult for them to plan for the future, reports veteran health-care writer Dylan Scott of Vox.

His object example is Titus Regional Medical Center in Mount Pleasant, Texas, which "lived through four separate surges in 18 months. They had reopened their building’s third floor, closed eight years ago, and relied on traveling nurses to staff their beds. Then, at the end of 2021, the government funding that had paid for that extra help ran out. For the first two months of 2022, as patients lined the building’s hallways and his staff struggled to find anywhere else to send them, [CEO Terry] Scoggin said his hospital experienced its most traumatic trial yet."

“We didn’t have the staff,” Scoggin told Scott. “People were dying and you couldn’t get them out.” Now he "worries about how three years without a real break — five Covid surges, a monkeypox case that forced his facility to prepare for a wider outbreak, and now a nasty wave of RSV and flu — is compromising his ability to plan and prepare for the future," Scott reports. "Four hospitals within 35 miles of his facility have closed in the last eight years. . . . Nearly one-third of people in Titus County are uninsured. It is a majority-minority area, 45 percent Hispanic and almost 10 percent Black." And Texas is one of the 12 mainly Southern states that haven't expanded Medicaid, which has been a lifeline for rural hospitals in states that have.

Scott cites some familiar data: "More than 130 rural US hospitals have closed in the past 10 years, and hundreds more are projected to be in danger of closing. According to one report from the University of North Carolina’s rural health research program, about 30 percent of all U.S. hospitals were operating in the red as of 2018. A majority of them are located in rural communities."