In an effort to prepare Capitol Hill staff for the July 31st March for Rural Hospitals, NRHA took part in a briefing yesterday in the House of Representatives on the importance of protecting Medicare payments for rural hospitals. The House Rural Health Coalition leads, Rep. Cathy McMorris Rogers and Rep. Ron Kind hosted the briefing.
With so much pressure on Congress for offsets to pay for the SGR problem, as well as the troubling messages from MedPAC, the Super Committee and others, all calling for cuts to rural hospitals, NRHA utilized the briefing to remind these young staffers of the history of rural. Specifically, we gently reminded them that when the Medicare hospital payment system switched to the Prospective Payment System (before many in the briefing room were born), hundreds of rural hospitals were forced to close across the nation, creating grave access problems for rural patients. Finally, Congress unambiguously and bipartisanly intervened to create the rural hospital payment system. Over several years of legislative growth, enhanced rural hospital payments did just what they were intended to do - - stop rural hospital closures. Today, many in Congress today have forgotten why (or never knew) why Sole Community Hospitals, Medicare Dependent Hospitals or even Critical Access Hospitals were purposefully created by Congress. It seems almost too elementary, but it’s critical to remind the lawmakers of today, that unless they protect these payment structures, access to health care in rural America will be jeopardized.
Last week, the University of Washington published the most comprehensive report on the state of American health in 15 years. The results were stark – life expectancy rates for men and women could almost be calculated by zip code. It showed that rural areas of poverty continue to face the greatest of challenges, and life expectancies in many of these areas were equivalent to third world nations such as Bangladesh and Algeria. We know that the challenges of delivering health care in rural America remain great. We need Congress to know this as well. Congress must build upon its modest investment in rural health as opposed to cut it to pay for some other for some other program.
We need your voice. Please join us in Washington, D.C. on July 31st. Your hospital’s Medicare payments depend on it.