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Posted on 11/30/2025 2:13:34 PM PST by CondoleezzaProtege
Glenn Medical Center in Willows closed Oct. 21 after losing “critical access” status for being 3 miles closer to the nearest hospital than rules require.
The closure strips emergency care from a poor farming community, eliminates 150 jobs and puts rural residents at risk of preventable deaths.
Many other California hospitals also face risks of closing because of federal healthcare cuts affecting cash-strapped rural healthcare systems.
These are questions that elected officials and policymakers may soon be confronting in rural communities across California and the nation. Cuts to Medicaid funding and the Affordable Care Act are likely to roll down from Washington and hit small hospitals already teetering on the brink of financial collapse. Even before these cuts hit, a 2022 study found that half of the hospitals in California were operating in the red. Already this fall, Palo Verde Hospital in Blythe filed for bankruptcy and Southern Inyo Hospital in Lone Pine sought emergency funds.
But things could get far worse: A June analysis released by four Democrats in the U.S. Senate found that many more hospitals in California could be at risk of closure in the face of federal healthcare cuts.
“It’s like the beginning of a tidal wave,” said Peggy Wheeler, vice president of policy of the California Hospital Assn. “I’m concerned we will lose a number of rural hospitals, and then the whole system may be at risk.”
(Excerpt) Read more at latimes.com ...
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We lost ours and the clinic that served it for the same reason.
Absurd.
Stupid, worthless government. Not your friend.
Certainly a "10" on Sabine's Bull Shit Meter...
Where in the constitution does it state that we must pay for a hospital in a county that is home to 28,000 people?
Maybe if that idiot Newsome hadn’t spent billions on “free” health care for illegals this wouldn’t have happened.
L
The problem comes down to how much can you pay the doctors to stay in your community?
Most aren’t willing to settle for $150,000 if they can earn $750,000 by living in the city.
For the record, I’d prefer to work in rural based community over the big city.
CNN headline is crying about a tiny clinic in a town of 200 with a part time NP that’s only in a few hours a week
Numbers from 2021...
https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/200494719
They were in the red then. Quite a bit. Bet the situation didn’t improve.
The Democrat hymnal has only a couple songs in it.
$100 BILLION on a train nobody needs or wants would have bought a lot of health care, too.
The number of Medicare/Medicaid users at these rural hospitals is astounding. And Medicare/medicaid pay about 80% on the dollar for the cost of providing care.
So, when your client base is 80% public insurance and they only pay 80% of the cost….it is difficult to break even because the private insurance payments are not enough to cover the gap.
This is going to happen all over the country because emergency rooms MUST provide treatment to people who won’t pay them. It’s not sustainable.
Lone Pine is just down the road from the sizable town of Bishop. P
Quick! Send more money overseas!
That will fix many problems we have here at home.
(Sarcasm, of course.)
Obamacare has destroyed healthcare in this country.
You used to read articles about hospitals closing because their emergency rooms were overrun by illegals
The current system of Medicare, Medicaid, VA Care, Medicare driving big insurance companies is a major factor.
Micro-specialization is a factor. We can’t just have a cancer doctor or family doctor....we now must have a specialist for each type of cancer and each sex and age group of family member.
The American belief that bigger is better is a major factor.
The ego of billionaires who donate to build new gigantic hospitals to their ego is a big factor.
Educated employees don’t want to live in rural America is a major factor.
But, above all, the way the medical community is regulated by the government is the single biggest factor.
The result is that we are building a system where the sole function of rural health providers is to be feeder-nodes to feed the large urban medical center.
When a patient is treated at the rural sender site and then again at the big urban center, the system can double bill for the same treatment.
That is even true internal to urban centers. A Hospital chain not only has rural hospitals feeding its urban giants, that hospital chain is buying up private practices and opening “urgent care centers” just blocks from those giant hospitals. What is the role of these new urgent care centers? To feed patients to the giant hospitals.
Good luck fixing it.
Willows - on I-5 about an hour north of Sacramento
Lone Pine - south end of the Owens Valley
Blythe - off I-10 just west of the Colorado River
Just become an all cash place and see how things rebound
Just think how neat it would be if there was a hospital on every street and country road!
Inter city emergency rooms and urgent care facilities are over run and are on the edge of losing the ability to provide reasonable and safe care.
Things such as MRI's and CAT scans that can mean the deference between an in time diagnoses and untreated fatal diseases are being delayed to accommodate CRIMINAL ILLEGAL ALIENS.
TAX paying American citizens are DYING hourly, daily, weekly because of this and the demoRATS, the woke left want you and I to pay more in taxes and get less in services back so they the left can build an ILLEGAL ALIEN block for census numbers and to allow them to vote.
As I write this NGO's, demoRATs political pac's, foreign socialist millionaires like george soros are funneling money to antifa and other paid professional protesters and terrorists to attack law enforcement and agents of the federal government. It's time we hold these provocateurs accountable for their treasonous activities.
I am sure that a large number of people would support the capture and extradition of soros and his ilk for trial or maybe a drone strike or two would get the point across?
What go you think?
P.S.
Since President Trump has wisely decided to stop and seize all suspect remittances and wire transfers out of the USA that have not been shown to be legally TAXED. That money should be distributed to those hospitals and care centers at risk to repay at part of what the Criminal Illegal Alien Scum have stolen from the American TAX payer.
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