RSS President Lisa Pruitt quoted in The Guardian regarding an expected spate of rural hospital closures
The Trump administration is revisiting whether rural hospitals across the nation provide “critical access,” a designation associated with a federal funding stream intended to help keep them open. That change and a loss of the funding led to the late September closure of the Glenn County Medical Center in Northern California, the county’s only hospital. Lisa R. Pruitt, RSS President and Distinguished Professor of Law at UC Davis, is quoted in The Guardian’s story regarding the closure and the general fragility of rural hospital funding:
“The funding for lots of hospitals is pretty fragile, but with rural hospitals, it’s kind of like a house of cards in that all these different funding streams that are not local,” Pruitt said. “If you’ve already got a fragile house of cards, then you take away one of the cards, it means that the facility is lost.”
Some 500 “critical access” hospitals across the United States no longer meet the requirement that they are at least 35 miles from the next nearest hospital. This means those hospitals are likely to lose that designation and the accompanying funding stream, leading to many more closures.