Rural Indiana Hospitals That Could Close if the Bill Passes
The following is a list of the hospitals that could close as a result of the Republican Budget Bill:
These small hospitals are key to the health care delivery in rural areas. While many of them have fallen in their status from decades ago, they’re still instrumental for primary care, emergency care, general surgery, and access to traveling specialists that visit these hospitals.
If these hospitals close, it will result in many more deaths due to the lack of critical care services as well as diminishing health status of Individuals who don’t have the means to travel 45 minutes to the next nearest hospital.
As a physician, this sickens me. I have worked at 3 of the hospitals on this list and the communities are very proud of their local health system. A large percentage of the community members were born in these hospitals!
In a developed country, the access to care should not be made MORE difficult, not today, not after coming so far since the age of the country doctor doing house calls, going farm to farm on horseback.
This bill is a gift to the large hospital systems that can continue to gobble up patients from these rural communities, who will no longer have a choice about where they seek care.
The bill still has to pass the House, but there is no reason to believe it will fail. They’ve been conditioned into complete fealty. And now, we only get sicker as a society.
DLW
My dad left Washington, Daviess County, Indiana to fight in World War 1. But my families in the Washington area go back to the 1810-1830 period — and plenty of them are still around. I guess I’m too late to try to organize them to oppose this bill, but I’ll say that seeing the community hospital in Washington on the top of the closing list was surely a wake-up call for me. I expect it would be for my relatives who still live there too.
Thanks for the heads-up and sorry to be late to the gate!
Rebrand them all as Trump and they will stay open!