Memo: The Case for Nationalizing Rural Hospitals

By Colin Wick

Executive Summary:

The healthcare debate mostly focuses on how to reach universal insurance coverage, but the actual provision of healthcare carries its own unique challenges that insurance reform can’t and won’t solve.

To ensure that doctors and nurses can provide care for those who need it most, we must fix how we manage rural hospitals. Since 2013, 103 rural hospitals have closed down. Closures occur in sparsely populated counties, where the median population was thirty thousand people. Compared to the nation at large, these counties have lower median incomes, older populations, and higher proportions of residents without health insurance—the exact sort of folks for whom access to healthcare is a top concern.

Eighty-three percent of rural hospital closures took place in states that did not expand Medicaid, and 77 percent took place in the South.

This policy brief lays out the obstacles that rural hospitals face, and why our current, privatized approach is failing rural communities. If we want to stop an avoidable health catastrophe that imposes staggering costs on the families and businesses of rural America, we must nationalize rural hospitals.

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