Section 1 Short title; table of contents
Short title— This Act may be cited as the “Save Rural Hospitals Act”.
Findings— Congress finds the following:
More than 60,000,000 individuals in rural areas of the United States rely on rural hospitals and other providers as critical access points to health care.
Access to health care is essential to communities that Americans living in rural areas call home.
Americans living in rural areas are older, poorer, and sicker than Americans living in urban areas.
From January 2010 until July 8, 2015, 55 rural hospitals have closed in the United States, according to the University of North Carolina’s Cecil G. Sheps Center for Health Services Research, and the rate of these closures is increasing.
Two hundred and eighty-three hospitals are at risk of closing, according to iVantage’s Hospital Strength INDEX study, and such closings would mean that 700,000 patients would be left without local access to care, 50,000 community jobs would be lost, 36,000 healthcare jobs would be lost, and $10,600,000,000 would be lost from the gross domestic product.
Rural Medicare beneficiaries already face a number of challenges when trying to access health care services close to home, including the weather, geography, and cultural, social, and language barriers.
Seventy-seven percent of rural counties in the United States are designated as primary care health professional shortage areas while 9 percent have no physicians at all.
Seniors living in rural areas are forced to travel significant distances for care.
On average, trauma victims in rural areas must travel twice as far as victims in urban areas to the closest hospital, and, as a result, 60 percent of trauma deaths occur in rural areas, even though only 20 percent of Americans live in rural areas.
With the 283 hospitals on the brink of closure, 700,000 Americans living in rural areas are on the brink of losing access to the closest emergency room.
Table of contents— The table of contents of this Act is as follows: