General Discussion

…and ER deaths go up from short-staffing. In cities, because that’s where the money is. Rural areas won’t turn a profit.

The alternative in outlying areas is the hospitals that end up run by the Roman Catholics, if you’re lucky. On the one hand, this is good because they are practicing medicine as a mission from God and not solely to make money. So if they are there, that’s good for men and children, and uncomplicated childbirth. On the other hand, if you are a grown woman you can very easily find yourself SOL, and I leave it to you to guess why.

US hospital care has been gradually hollowing itself out for the last 30 years, and it’s because of our intensely for-profit medical system. Hospitals are very expensive to run, and nurses are one of the most expensive items in the budget — because a hospital needs a lot of nurses and they need a lot of education, just as doctors do. For-profit corporations with no connection to medicine look at all those nurses and think they are an expense that can be trimmed, not an absolute necessity for hands-on care and hour by hour observation.

The disappearance of rural hospitals and clinics, and atrocities in big-city hospitals like “granny dumping” all have the same root cause: treating all aspects of medical care like a business. Thanks to the GOP, over the last century-plus the US has found itself utterly unable to fix the problem as a whole.

Dems like LBJ and Obama/Biden have gotten some really good bits done, but only by fighting the GOP and their sponsors tooth and claw. It’s been a battle every step of the way — and thanks to Project 2025 we are on the verge of losing everything now.

End of sermon. But that is what happened to rural medical care.