Hillarysworld

Hillarysmygirl16 · Administrator

Why We Must Save Our Community Hospital (Voicesfromthehood 12-13-09)

freespirit · Moderator

What a shame. I hope your community is successful in saving this medical facility. It is always about the bottom line. All about the bucks.

Jen the Michigander · SuperModerator

IMO, this is where health care reform should start, by providing funding to existing hospitals and clinics that are located in high poverty areas. Hospitals are not a luxury; they're a necessity.

Building 4112 · Moderator

That's not right, but I think we will see a trend here. Betcha they try to replace it with a clinic.

Hillarysmygirl16 · Administrator

Building 4112 wrote:

That's not right, but I think we will see a trend here. Betcha they try to replace it with a clinic.

We have plenty of clinics here but they probley will. I go to a wonderful clinic who charges on a sliding fee and of course all the doctors are women.

Sanders · Diamond

It is extremely important that neighborhood clinics and community hospitals survive and thrive.

There are so many people totally reliant upon them. We can all find ways to support them.. I will look them up.

On a personal side.. my mom once was very ill with a very rare and serious illness that required us to get medicine from another city (in India) and she underwent twice a week injections for this... Of course, we were on the low end of middle class in a poor country.. and we had to do all kinds of things.. including reuse syringe, needles.. we would boil those in clean water from our local well (which itself is a bit questionable how clean the water was to begin with).. but mom went to local clinic for her injection.. she could hardly walk. We had no transportation of our own.. and it was close enough that we would go with her, holding her hand.

But for that clinic, I dont think I would have had a mom next year. We lived the government funded clinics and community hospitals in another country and know that it is essential for a large part of the community. It was not the prettiest thing to live through.. but I am grateful for the miracle that made my mom recover.

Community hospitals in the US are really in dire state of affairs, living on grants and on the generosity of donors. Hard economic times have affected many of them. They are worth supporting.. because it is really the people that we are supporting in the process.

jdona · Platinum

This is going to be repeated all throughout this country if we end up with a single payer option in health care. Its one of the reasons my congressman, Rick Boucher, voted against the health care bill. We are rural, and all our hospitals are not for profits here. Medicaid/Medicare, do not pay what it costs to provide treatment, they pay approximately 70% according to the last estimate I read. The other 30% is paid for by private health insurance so that the hospitals at least break even. If you expand Medicare for all, which a lot of people, including me, lobby for, the hospitals will go bankrupt, UNLESS, they bring the rate of payments up to the actual costs of treatment. So far, all you hear is Medicare is going broke, and will be out of money in 20 years. So why not take all this money a new government agency will cost, and just fund Medicare with it? How many billions will it take to reinvent the wheel?

-- Edited by jdona on Monday 14th of December 2009 08:56:22 PM