The Kansas City Star, March 16
Under normal circumstances, the closing of a community hospital in Sumner County, Kansas, would be disturbing, yet not surprising - another small-town health facility falling victim to higher costs and fewer patients.
Circumstances are anything but normal right now. The coronavirus epidemic has exposed the nation’s disastrous shortfall of hospital beds, trained staff and needed equipment, a situation that will worsen in the weeks ahead.
That makes the closure of the 63-bed Sumner Community Hospital a crisis, one that demands immediate attention from Gov. Laura Kelly, the Legislature and the broader health industry.
The hospital’s doors closed suddenly Thursday in Wellington, a city of about 7,800 south of Wichita. RHG Consolidated, based in Kansas City, shut the doors on a facility it purchased in 2018, blaming a revenue shortfall and a lack of patient demand.
“We have tried so hard to save our local hospital and know that this is heartbreaking for our community,” Sumner Community CEO Cindy West said in a statement. “As time has passed, it became obvious that the ability to overcome the challenges we faced was impossible.”
To be sure, the facility had struggled for many years. Doctors often referred patients to hospitals in Wichita, leaving Sumner Community’s beds empty. The county’s population, about 23,000 people, strained to support a local hospital.
But the closure will mean hardship. Because the emergency room is shutting down, critically ill patients will have to take a 40-minute ambulance ride to Wichita instead of a short trip to the local ER.
The hospital was one of Wellington’s biggest employers, and those jobs will apparently be lost as well.
Sumner Community’s problems are not isolated. A 2019 study showed almost one-third of rural Kansas hospitals at “high risk” of closure. Two-thirds of those hospitals are considered essential to their communities.
The stubborn refusal of Kansas Republicans to expand Medicaid coverage has made this bad situation worse. For years, small rural hospitals have told lawmakers that the additional revenue from the state-federal program would provide an essential financial cushion. That hasn’t changed many minds, or votes.
On Friday, some in the GOP continued to insist that rural hospitals’ problems aren’t linked to Medicaid. Yet they’ve offered virtually no solution to the health care crisis that is sweeping across rural Kansas.
Lawmakers can’t duck the issue any longer. Kansas has roughly 3.3 hospital beds per 1,000 residents, fewer than China, Cuba, Japan and Argentina. Ukraine has more than twice as many hospital beds, proportionally, than Kansas.
If the novel coronavirus escalates in the state - Kansas had reported eight COVID-19 cases as of Sunday - those lost beds in Sumner County might mean the difference between life or death for some patients.
The Legislature should step forward and find money that could be used to reopen Sumner Community Hospital. Perhaps the University of Kansas Health System could play a role, as it has in other cases. If not, other solutions may be possible.
Rural Kansas should not be at greater risk from COVID-19 than those who live in urban areas. The ongoing crisis in rural health care must be addressed, as the number of coronavirus cases multiplies in the state.
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The Topeka Capital-Journal, March 14
To understand how the United States is dealing with the threat of coronavirus, you have to hold two truths in your mind simultaneously.
First, the risk to any one individual in the United States is low. Even if you contract the virus at some point, your symptoms will likely be mild.
Second, we can ill-afford to have everyone contract the virus at once. Even if only a small fraction of the cases require hospitalization, our health care infrastructure isn’t prepared to handle the influx of cases.
Those two truths, taken together, is why the country switched this week to canceling many large events - and postponed or outright canceled sport seasons - and encouraging people to work from home.
It’s not about overreacting. It’s about flattening the curve.
That means we want to keep the spread of the virus relatively slow, so health care professionals are able to ramp up their capacity naturally and devote all necessary resources to each case.
In both China and Italy, we’ve seen the consequences of not taking these measures soon enough. Health care systems were swamped, and in some cases, doctors faced agonizing choices. Critically ill patients had longer or more painful stays (or possibly even died) because treatment had to be spread among so many at once.
We know relatively little about the disease - it’s even unsure how many people actually contract it because of testing limitations. We have no vaccine or proven treatment (although several drug treatments are currently in progress). And we have no natural immunity in the general population.
All of those truths taken together mean that we really, as a global community, have one option to slow or stop the virus: Shutting things down. That allows us to keep our distance from one another, and slow or stop transmission altogether.
It’s inconvenient, yes. The economy is already showing strain. But as we’ve seen in China and South Korea, it’s also effective. Cases and deaths have dropped drastically in China, which admittedly went about things in an authoritarian way. South Korea had fewer restrictions, but implemented widespread testing and stringent quarantine for those who were positive.
Without the testing capacity of South Korea (at least right now), the United States has to opt for blunter methods. That means canceling games, moving to online classes and postponing festivals or other gatherings.
The question is not whether we will make it through this. Of course we will. The question is whether we’re able to do so in a way that allows those who fall ill the best possible treatment.
We will save lives by doing so.
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