Sunday, June 1, 2014

Obamacare Fallout: Many Rural Hospitals find Themselves on the Critical List

It’s been “probably a decade” since 68-year-old Tom Howell last saw a doctor. A nagging cough and some chest pain finally prompted him to drive 30 miles from his home in Iowa to the closest medical facility, Midwest Medical Center in Galena, Illinois. 
"I've been coughing so hard I couldn’t catch my breath. My wife said I had to see the doc, so here I am,” Howell said
He said part of the reason he avoided seeing “the doc” for so long was because he didn't have health insurance. As a self-employed farmer in Iowa, he couldn’t afford it and said he didn’t see a need for it. 
But he’s now on Medicare, so doctors bills are less of a concern. 
The U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates more than 46 million Americans live in rural areas, working on farms or in small factories that provide resources for the rest of the country.
Often in these less populated areas, there is only one medical facility for the entire community. 
Much of the funding for rural hospitals, about 60 percent, comes from Medicare. The rest comes from Medicaid or from general health insurance. 
Budgets are so tight for these smaller hospitals, where patients are often older and sicker than the general population, that any changes to these programs -- even slight changes -- can have drastic effects on their budgets.
That's why recent cuts by the Obama administration for Medicare reimbursement funding are a grave concern to rural healthcare administrators. In addition, there's an October deadline for upgrading to electronic medical records. If the deadline isn't met, hospitals risk penalties. 
But making the upgrades is not as simple as it sounds, especially for smaller medical offices that are still on pen and paper. 
“Going from paper to electronic medical records is a big process," said Dr. Michael Wells of the Midwest Medical Center in Galena. "It takes a lot of personnel and staff and support for information technology just alone, so it's a huge task for a smaller hospital when we don’t have the number of employees to support that."
Midwest Medical Center CEO Tracy Bauer agreed. "It's a huge undertaking. We'll have invested over two million dollars in the project…The expense has been huge, the resources needed for it have also been huge”. 
The combination of Medicare cuts and the added expense of transferring to electronic records is part of the reason there has been an epidemic of rural hospital closures. Eighteen have shut their doors since the beginning of 2013, more than closed in the entire decade before then.
Read the rest of the story HERE

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