Most of us in the United States take our hospitals for granted. In this country, when we or a loved one gets sick or injured, we know that there will be a healthcare facility, often less than an hour away, staffed with medical professions who will provide the best, most advanced care and treatment in the world. But will that always be the case?
Our nation’s hospitals are under enormous pressures. Existing and emerging health threats, like the recent COVID-19 pandemic, rising costs, and misguided government interventions are all taking their toll on hospitals and other medical providers, especially smaller ones and those in the nation’s rural areas.
Rural hospital budgets are being stretched to the breaking point. The proof is in the number of rural hospitals that are closing their doors. Between 2004 and 2019, more than 150 rural hospitals across the nation shut down. In 2020, as the pandemic hit our shores, another 19 closed. Even with the massive amount of government spending during the height of the pandemic in 2021 and 2022 another 6 rural hospitals closed. Today nearly 30% of rural hospitals are at risk of closing, leaving the people in those communities vulnerable to losing rapid access to high-level medical care – not to mention imperiling a sizeable percentage of local jobs and a core engine of regional economies.
Meanwhile, in our quest for more and more “free” healthcare, policymakers around the country are instituting rate caps for providers and cutting Medicare and Medicaid reimbursements. “Free” health care simply means health care that someone else pays for, and all too often it is hospitals and providers left holding the bag.
To try and cope with all of these financial pressures and still provide quality care to their patients and communities, hospitals have worked to come up with viable solutions. One of the tools available for smaller hospitals to remain open and viable is to merge together with larger hospital systems. But now the Biden administration, through the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), is trying to shut that door as well.
Hospital mergers offer several potential benefits for smaller, mainly rural hospitals. They provide such facilities with access to capital, resources, and technology that is often beyond local capacities. Those resources not only help those hospitals keep their doors open, but also allow them to provide a greater level of patient care. For instance, researchers at Maryland’s Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, along with IBM Watson Health, found in a 2021 study that rural hospitals which merged with larger systems experienced improvements in mortality rates of several conditions, including heart failure, hip fractures, and pneumonia. A large part of that improvement is due to increased access to state-of-the-art diagnostic technology, treatments, and expertise.
The FTC, which under the current administration has become far more activist and radical in its approach, has consistently worked to block these sorts of mergers, placing bureaucratic obstacles in front of hospitals that are simply looking for a lifeline. Rather than looking at the facts on the ground and responding to real-world needs, the FTC is relying on a combination of outdated modelling and ideological bias to deny these facilities the opportunity that for many of them may be the only chance they have. It is patently unfair for the government to, on one hand, place all these enormous financial burdens on hospitals and providers, then on the other, take from them one of the only remaining tools they have to try and meet the challenges they are facing.
Consolidation may not be the answer for every struggling hospital as every situation and locality is different and the individual circumstances may call for different solutions. But for many smaller and rural hospitals around the country, merging and pooling resources together or with a larger hospital system may be the best or only solution to allow them to stay open, serve their communities and provide the level of medical care that Americans have come to expect. For those which would benefit from it, the government should not be standing in the way.
