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Your help is needed to avoid catastrophic cuts to our rural healthcare safety net. Members of Congress are coming back from their summer recess beginning today. A new bipartisan congressional committee, charged with identifying $1.5 trillion in deficit reductions by Nov. 23, may consider rural health expenditures and up to $16 billion in spending cuts directly focused on rural providers and facilities. Officially titled “The Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction,” twelve members from both parties have all been appointed to this “super committee”: House representatives Xavier Becerra (D-Calif.), Jim Clyburn (D-S.C.), Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.); Jeb Hensarling (R-Tx.), co-chair, Fred Upton (Mich.), Dave Camp (R-Mich.); and in the Senate, Jon Kyl (R-Az.), Pat Toomey (R-Pa.), Rob Portman (R-OH), John Kerry (D-Mass.), Max Baucus (D-MO), and Patty Murray (D-WA), co-chair. In California we need to especially focus on Representative Becerra and make sure that he has the information he needs about rural healthcare and the impact would have on access to care and quality of care in rural California.
Rural Health Clinics (RHCs), Federally Qualified Health Centers (FQHCs), Critical Access Hospitals (CAHs), rural hospitals and individual providers make up the rural healthcare safety net. Congress has long recognized all of these healthcare provider settings as vital to ensuring access to primary, emergency, preventative and long term care in underserved rural areas of our nation and in rural California. In California, 85% of our land mass is rural, 44 of our 58 counties are rural, and more than 13.7% of our state’s population or 5.3 million live in rural areas. In fact one out of every 60 (sixty) Americans live in rural California.
Cuts to the Rural Healthcare Safety Net will: (a) decrease access to care in Underserved Communities, (b) increase costs of providing Medicare and Medicaid, and (c) disrupt the local economy.
Many people have worked painstakingly over many decades to build a rural healthcare safety net that will adequately serve not only our rural population, but also the other millions of people who work, recreate and travel through the rural parts of our state. In addition, rural economies depend upon these health facilities for jobs, economic growth and revenue production. More than 11% of California’s rural workforce works in healthcare; this is compared to 9% of the workforce working in California’s important agricultural sector.
Also, unlike in urban areas of the state, if you cut into the rural safety net, there are not other layers of healthcare available. Making cuts and holes in our rural healthcare safety net cannot easily be mended. Losing a rural hospital or clinic only means that the population they served must travel long distances to seek healthcare. Such inconvenience translates into people waiting until they are much sicker before traveling and seeking healthcare, compliance for caring for chronic conditions is harder and less likely to be fully successful, and research shows there is an increase in hospitalization when health access is lessened in a community.
Cutting rural healthcare is also not sound economic policy. Loss of healthcare jobs ripples out into other rural community sectors and ends up causing more economic problems and increased unemployment. Economic modeling research shows that if a community loses a Critical Access Hospital due to federal budget cuts, more than 100 jobs are lost on average, and the non-health sector in that community takes a 28% hit in terms of retail business.
TAKE ACTION ! Right now and continuing throughout September, CALL your Congressional representative and request that s/he contact members of the Super Committee. The California State Rural Health Association (CSHRA) asks Congress to protect the rural healthcare safety net, protect rural jobs and help ensure healthcare is accessible in rural communities.
TALKING POINTS
ARGUMENTS: When confronted by such an unprecedented list of spending cuts, it is critically important for Members of the Super Committee to understand that:
- The closure of a hospital or clinic in a rural area will simply shift the demand for health services to urbanized areas. Longer distances to visit the doctor will result in sicker patients waiting to seek care, worsening conditions, and higher costs for the health system.
- Eleven percent of the rural workforce in California is employed in health care and cuts here translate into deepening recession in our already hard-hit rural communities.
- The closure of one rural hospital in your district would cut deeply into the employment base of the local community due to job loss. Economic research has also shown that other retail businesses in the community can suffer retail sales losses of between 25 to 28%.
- The delay in care and poor access to health services and prevention will negatively affect the health status of entire communities.
- Forcing families to travel long distances often leads to multiple medical appointments in a single trip, increasing the risk of ineffective or counter-productive treatment therapies when not managed by a primary care physician.
CLOSING: While CSRHA recognizes the difficulties faced when finding areas to cut spending, we encourage all Members of Congress to recognize the great need faced in rural California and fund those facilities and programs accordingly. In sum, the rural healthcare safety net must not be unraveled at the expense of access to care.
NOTE. A legislative packet and more details from the National Rural Health Association are available by going to http://www.ruralhealthweb.org/go/left/government-affairs/congressional-recess-kit
Mark your calendars and Register Now:
Embracing Change for the Future of Rural
Health, November 15-17, 2011
View current rural job openings, click here
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555 Capitol Mall, Ste 750, Sacramento, CA 95814
Telephone: (916) 453-0780| Fax: (916) 453-0783
E-mail: advocate@csrha.org |
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