Georgia Insurance

Fairfax, SC - The small town hospital is the mother ship for medical practitioners in the Outback of South Carolina and Georgia, rural health, experts say, but they are local institutions gewelkt by the same economic pressures slamming great City suburbs and medical centres.

Without a local hospital in a rural area of the health sector depends on a thin line of doctors practicing medicine base with little support, are obliged to send patients with urban centres to extend services emergency medical and surgical treatment of cancer baby deliveries.

With a hospital in a rural area is an emergency, extra beds, the probability of a surgeon or other health professionals and a key selling point for the recruitment of medical talent.

If you have a rural hospital of a municipality, you crippled its power of attraction for new doctors, “said Glenn Pearson, Executive Vice President of the Georgia Hospital Association.

Soaring premiums art medical errors, high unemployment and a decline in industrial insurance, the number of patients leave the hospital rural according Medicaid patients and payments did not cover costs.

Accordingly, rural hospitals are either closed or drastically reduce their services. Many, including Edgefield County Hospital, are no longer babies to provide high premiums to avoid the excesses of the birth of aid.

Some were forced to drastic measures in the short term. To cover their premiums, Bacon County Hospital in Alma, Ga., recently introduced a credit, Mr. Pearson said.

“The hospitals in rural areas can not be kept 200 and 300 percent of the premium art medical errors,” he said. “They are the reduction of services. They are equipped with staff. ”

Since 1996, 15 Georgia hospitals have closed, “said Pearson, more than half of them in rural districts.

Last year, 58 percent of acute care hospitals in Georgia lost money, “he said. Acute hospitals are before the line of health care organizations, management of emergencies and patients with diseases are growing rapidly.

Since 1985, only two hospitals have closed in South Carolina, said Jim Walker, executive director of South Carolina Hospital Association, but rural Palmetto public hospitals are established and staff.

“Our hospitals, there is not in a vacuum, and our hospitals reflect what’s happening in the economies of their communities,” said Walker.

Small city hospitals are more sensitive to the financial pressure on American health, because fewer opportunities for their relocation costs of the uninsured and underinsured patients with commercial health insurance, said Pete Bailey, a health specialist with the Research Office of Budget of South Carolina and Bord control purposes.

This is because rural constituencies lost textile mills and other employers of the first order, says Bailey. With the loss of jobs, loss of commercial insurance coverage.

Hospitals small town against competition from the suburbs of the city and Big medical centers, the establishment of satellite clinics poaching or stores in rural areas of the county’s few remaining large employers, Mr. Bailey said.

“What concerns me is whether we are moving head down a road leading to the closure of hospitals in rural areas,” he said.

It foresees the rise of a vicious circle for rural health care.

“It is not only a hospital and the doctor problem is a problem community,” said Bailey. “If the hospital closed, many of these doctors are no longer there, and then you have a problem of extraction of employment and industry, to see before the next hospital in So you’re really talking in rural areas because rural people are gone. ”

This means that the problem of rural health care is not just an issue that is not enough doctors or evening, the distribution of differences between urban and rural areas, said Mark Jordan, a sector of Rural Health, a specialist in the South Carolina Department of Health and Environmental Control.

To fight against this trend, many small community hospitals are petitioning federal health officials to designate as critical access.

In return for higher reimbursement rates for Medicare, more than 100 percent of their costs, hospitals that the state agree to limit their services and partnerships with major hospitals offer a full range of care, Gregory said Saturday, the director of the Edgefield County Hospital in 32 years, 40 beds settlement insofar as the residential areas of Strom Thurmond.

Repayment and the lack of them is a big problem, “said Gregory, whose board is of critical taking into account access to mark.

Smaller hospitals are making a difference in the range of health care in rural areas such as South Carolina courts Barnwell, Allendale and Edgefield counties.

Barnwell County’s 22 doctors a cardiologist, a surgeon, a dermatologist and four doctors of emergency. Edgefield County’s 19 doctors, three surgeons, one thoracic and cardiovascular specialists.

Once the zone of bedding Allendale County Hospital also offers a chance for doctors to keep patients close to home.

“It is essential that we have somewhere we can take care of you and for them and offer a continuum of care,” said Dr. Eddie Richardson, medical director in the Low Country Health Systems Inc., a rural clinic near the hospital.