Section 1 Short title; table of contents
Short title— This Act may be cited as the “Save America’s 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.
Between January 2010 and January 1, 2021, 137 rural hospitals 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.
Four hundred and fifty-three hospitals are operating at margins similar to those that have closed over the past decade. Of those, 216 are considered most vulnerable to closure.
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.
Approximately sixty percent of all primary care health professional shortage areas are located in rural areas.
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 453 hospitals on the brink of closure, millions of 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: