The 'Rural Access' Lie: Profiting from the Corpse

There is a specific type of blackmail used by the healthcare lobby. It goes like this: "If you touch our profits, we will close the hospital in your grandmother's town."

Here is the grim irony: They are closing it anyway.

Under the current system, rural hospitals are dying of starvation. Why? Because the current business model is "Fee-For-Service." You only get paid if you do things to people.

If you are a massive urban hospital, you can churn out profitable knee replacements and MRIs like a factory. But if you are a rural hospital, you deal mostly with heart attacks, strokes, and farm accidents. These are "emergencies." They are expensive to treat, but they don't generate the massive profit margins of elective surgery.

Because rural areas have fewer people, the math of "Fee-For-Service" guarantees bankruptcy. You cannot make up in volume what you lose on every patient.

So, private insurers starve them. They pay low rates, deny claims, and force the hospital to chase pennies. Then, when the hospital inevitably goes broke, the same lobbyists blame "government regulation."

The Trap: The market demands volume. Rural health is about presence, not volume. A fire station doesn't go bankrupt because there weren't enough fires this month. A rural hospital shouldn't either.