Pennsylvania Ping!
Please ping me with articles of interest.
FReepmail me to be added to the list.
Posted on 04/18/2026 4:00:54 PM PDT by CondoleezzaProtege
The UNC Sheps Center, which tracks rural hospital infrastructure in the United States, has documented 195 rural hospitals that have closed or converted to outpatient facilities since January 2005. Six are in Pennsylvania. Closures have far outpaced the opening of new rural hospitals during this period.
As a physician who has trained in rural communities and a researcher who studies community well-being and public health, we see that every rural hospital closure exerts a domino effect on surrounding communities and residents. This can be difficult to quantify but manifests as lost jobs and economic decline, poorer health and a pervasive sense of fraying community fabric.
Our 2022 study found that when a rural hospital closes, hospitals nearby see a measurable spike in inpatient admissions and emergency room visits that can cause significant financial strain. It’s a phenomenon we called “the bystander effect” of hospital closures.
Closures can sometimes feel random, but they are predictable consequences of the combination of health policy and market forces.
Rural hospitals face a financially difficult task: serve an older, working-class community while staying solvent and being prepared for emergencies at any hour.
The core problem is what economists term “high fixed costs” – for staff, equipment, facilities and administration – that stay relatively stable even when fewer patients walk through the door.
Rural hospitals also tend to rely heavily on Medicaid and Medicare reimbursements, which typically pay less than private insurance companies. This leaves a smaller cushion when costs rise...
Maternity care is especially concerning. A national study found 537 hospitals stopped delivering babies between 2010 and 2022, with 238 of them located in rural areas.
An estimated 22 of Pennsylvania’s 67 counties – all of them rural – do not have a hospital that provides labor and delivery services...
(Excerpt) Read more at theconversation.com ...
Dear FRiends,
We need your continuing support to keep FR funded. Your donations are our sole source of funding. No sugar daddies, no advertisers, no paid memberships, no commercial sales, no gimmicks, no tax subsidies. No spam, no pop-ups, no ad trackers.
If you enjoy using FR and agree it's a worthwhile endeavor, please consider making a contribution today:
Click here: to donate by Credit Card
Or here: to donate by PayPal
Or by mail to: Free Republic, LLC - PO Box 9771 - Fresno, CA 93794
Thank you very much and God bless you,
Jim
Go to any hospital emergency room and you will probably find many if not most of the patients are foreign. They don’t pay, we do.
Hospitals need economic stability to survive. I was a CPA hospital consultant for many years back in the late 1970’s and 1980’s. I did the old cost reimbursement reports and then helped many hospitals switch over to DRG’s and function more like a for profit business. This was necessary due to the government changing hospital care funding formulas.
The cost of malpractice insurance is obscene in obstetrics. Many have closed their maternity wards to save on the insurance cost.
Many metro hospitals have closed their Emergency Rooms as they found that the majority of “No Pay” patients entered the hospital through the ER.
Corporate health care is about the health of the corporation not the health of the patient.
Most E.R. these days are a separate business from the hospital itself. But your point is valid.
This mindset might be part of the problem. Opening new businesses and closing other ones all the time is a retail business model, and health care doesn't fit that model well.
High cost, low volume, possible lower pay, and attracting qualified staff to work there are problems.
Ping.
“Why rural hospitals in Pennsylvania and across the country are closing in increasing numbers”. Charting.
My friend lived in a town in central PA. Nearly everyone there was white and native born.
It was once an industrial town but no longer. The hospital was probably the largest employer. The old people were lovely and too many young people were on drugs.
My friend got cancer. There was one oncologist and he was a circuit rider who lived in Maryland and rotated through seven Pennsylvania hospitals. He was in town one day a week.
Don’t get sick in the sticks. It took months to do all the testing from first suspicion and start treatment.
Pennsylvania Ping!
Please ping me with articles of interest.
FReepmail me to be added to the list.
In MA they all got bought up by University of Massachusetts Medical. Literally every single one.
-SB
Government mandated the use of electronic medical records, starting in 2014. Epic Systems, one of the largest purveyors of EMR systems had a revenue of almost $6 billion dollars last year. The CEO of Epic Systems was a big donor to Obama when the EMR requirements were being written into Obamacare. I know personally of hospital systems that paid an initial $250 million dollars to initiate Epic - more thereafter. There were and are much cheaper, AND BETTER ways to do this. It's very hard for rural hospitals to fork out the money required to set up and maintain a HIPPA compliant EMR.
Administrative costs in the US are pushing 30% of every health care dollar. In much of the world it's 15% or less. We can't sustain this. A lot of this cost is because of how complicated the government has made compliance with federal rules, medicare and medicaid billing etc. This can all be simplified. We should have state-wide purchasing exchanges for equipment and supplies, shared imaging / diagnostics facilities with centralized (shared) administrations when possible. The amount of each government-funded health care dollar that goes to administrative costs should be capped at 15-18%. Spending more than this on administrative costs should be punishable by big fines.
Malpractice awards need to be capped, but along with that it should be easier to weed out bad physicians. The federal government, which is way overrepresented by lawyers, protects malpractice as an industry.
Small rural hospitals emergency rooms and urgent care facilities have been run out of business and CLOSED because of NON reimbursed costs for the treatment of CRIMINAL ILLEGAL ALIENS SCUM more are at risk.
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 ALIEN SCUM.
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 CRIMINAL ILLEGAL ALIEN SCUM 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 do you think?
P.S.
As of April 2026 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.
About two-thirds of Pennsylvania’s counties have lost population between 2020 and 2025. Hospitals are closing because their “customer base” is declining.
The main problem is that rural hospitals are trying to do too much. They need to right size what they can offer and anything more should be referred to an urban hospital.
Y’all are probably tire of this, but it is all
the Business models the Democrats promote.
Of course all the sick should be cared for,
however the people that won’t work and expect
handouts, should NOT be the equals of
those that do work and those that pay for
those handouts.
This isn’t about drugs, poverty, or religion.
It is about personal responsibility for your actions!
I should not have to support a person lacking
a sense of personal responsibility.
Not in a monetary sense, but
in a character sense.
I have way more respect for a bum in a
alcoholic stupor, sleeping in the gutter,
Than I do for the druggie selling
drugs so they can get more personal
gratification, having more kids to get more
services, and giving my tax dollars to people
that despise our way of life.
Show some respect for others.
You’ll earn my respect,
be selfish and lose it.
“There are a ton of factors”
Agreed.
1) Successful hospitals have the Walmart philosophy. A customer comes in with 1 little need. Tell the customer they really need 15 other things. Load up the shopping cart.
2) Make sure test results are done first that will drive up the billing rate for subsequent tests. Raise suspicion of a contagious disease and all the subsequent (unnecessary) tests can be billed at a higher rate.
3) Big Metro Medical Centers need volume to pay for their high cost. Rural Providers are bought up and turned into a chain that feeds the big costly Metro Center.
4) Human nature. More commercial insured than Medicaid/Medicare insured patients...but them also... want to go to the big Metro hospital not for better care, but for the prestige.. so they can boast to their friends about going to the big one.
5) The BIGGEE: Some say good health is in good lifestyle, good nutrition, good exercise. Others say good health is in good medical care. The higher the cost of good medical care the better the proof that it MUST be better than good lifestyle.
Have medicaid and insurance pay for the high cost of tobacco, alcohol, drugs, STD. Tell society, “no problemo”. Your insurance/Medicaid/Medicare will pay for the high cost professionals to perpetually treat you for the results of a bad lifestyle.
How much of this is due to them having to having to provide free medical care to any illegal alien that walks in the door?
Trump .
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.