Health Care
- Health Care
- Rural areas have different healthcare challenges than cities and suburbs. Hospitals and clinics struggle to make ends meet and find doctors willing to live and work nearby. Many specific medical issues such as mental health and drug abuse are more severe in rural areas. We need to devote more attention and resources to getting rural residents access to affordable, high-quality healthcare.
This is a challenging problem to overcome, but a critical one.
We can start by ensuring those who cannot afford healthcare are on Medicaid by having hospital/clinic administrators and social workers assist in the completion of those applications, this will transfer most of the burden of costs for insurance to the federal government and medical costs to insurance. Hospitals have an interest in getting paid and they should help in the process.
We can look into how the state can be more effective in supplying medical services, possibly opening state funded free clinics in the poorer areas of the state for those who don’t have insurance. The clinic would help them complete the Medicaid application and get signed up for health insurance as a mandatory action for service. They could supply transportation to nearby hospitals for more advanced needs.
We could incentivize heath care professionals with real estate buy downs of distressed properties. This works well in the big cities to get emergency personnel to move into undesirable and high crime neighborhoods.
There are many things that can be done. The correct answer will be found in a deep analysis of the “root cause” and that’s where we should start. We should not start with addressing the end result, that’s just putting a band aid on the issue – no pun intended! ????