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Nov. 11, 2023 - Epoch Times
21:15
600+ Hospitals Collapsing over Covid Mandates, Fed Arm Twists, Brain Drain
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During the COVID pandemic, or more specifically, in the latter part of the pandemic, when the federal government was rolling out these various vaccine mandates, well, a situation arose, which by all accounts was ridiculous.
And the situation went something like this.
On the one hand, the country was sold the idea that we have to lock everything down because our hospital system was understaffed and on the brink of collapse.
But on the other hand, the federal government rolled out these vaccine mandates to almost all hospital workers, which had the effect of Of something like 10% of the staff being forced out of their jobs, because they refused to take the shot.
The government effectively forced around 10% of these workers out of a job at the same time when hospitals were already, allegedly, at the breaking point.
And unfortunately, there were hospitals and medical centers for which this was the straw that broke the camel's back.
They shut down because, on top of everything else, they just couldn't deal with 10% of their staff members leaving because of the mandates.
Furthermore, even outside of COVID, over the past 20 years, we saw 200 hospitals across the nation shut down, with, I should mention, another 600 hospitals, mostly in rural areas, currently in financial distress and on the brink of closing in the next few years.
For your reference, this represents about 30% of all rural hospitals nationwide.
And so, it was exactly this situation which sparked a full-length investigation, which ultimately culminated in this film right here, Flatline, America's Hospital Crisis.
If you'd like to check out that phenomenal film, it's exclusively over on Epic TV. I'll throw a link to it down in the description box below.
However, today, we have the great opportunity to sit down and speak with Mr.
Steve Gruber.
He is an award-winning journalist, he's a radio host, and he's the producer of this film.
And during our discussion, he exposed for us how, among many other things, government incompetence is what's leading to these closures, as well as what the real-world effects are on the people who live in the communities where the hospital just one day shuts down.
And so, take a quick moment to smash those like and subscribe buttons and take a look.
Steve, thank you so much for joining us.
Maybe to start with, can you sort of lay out for the audience why you decided to go ahead and make a documentary specifically about hospitals in America?
Well, you know, it came to my attention here a while ago, probably a couple of years ago now.
I was interviewing the president of a small rural hospital in southern Michigan.
He said, and this is right in the teeth of the pandemic, 2021.
He said, look, here's the problem we're facing.
We have about 550 positions on staff.
Currently we're 10% below staffing levels.
We already have that problem.
And the government at that time was coming along and requiring that hospitals and healthcare organizations have everybody fully vaccinated.
If they weren't fully vaccinated, they'd have to get fired because if you didn't do that, the hospital wouldn't get reimbursed for Medicare, whatever it might be.
And so at that time, he said, look, my problem is this.
I've had a woman running my emergency room for the last 15 years.
She's an RN.
She's great.
And she's leaving.
Doesn't want the vaccine.
And so we started to talk deeper.
And he said, we're 10% below what we should have already.
And he goes, and if you didn't know it, hospitals all over this country, small hospitals, and that's about a, oh, about a 70-bed hospital.
80-bed hospital.
He said all over this country are struggling and going out of business.
So I started to look.
I was curious.
I started to look.
I found hospitals going out of business in Texas and Tennessee, Montana and Maine, all over this country.
And people don't realize it, Roman.
It's a huge problem because when do you think about the hospital?
If you don't work there, when do you think about it?
You think about it when you need it.
Otherwise, it's just, oh, you just always assume it's there.
But it's not.
Financial crises have put hospitals in big trouble, and as I found out, more than 600 hospitals today.
Hundreds have gone out of business already, a couple of hundred in the last 10 or 15 years.
600 today are in financial crisis across this country.
And that, my friend, is a healthcare tragedy in the making.
According to your research, is it mostly in the rural areas that these hospitals are shutting down or in the suburban or urban areas?
Well, certainly rural hospitals are more at risk for a variety of reasons.
But we traveled to three different places in the course of the film for hospitals and one place for ambulance services that are also going bankrupt.
People don't realize ambulance services are also financially strapped because they can't find enough people to man the ambulances.
But we went to Massillon, Ohio.
Now that's a town of, oh, 250,000 people, so pretty good-sized, mid-sized city in America.
They lost two hospitals in 10 years.
Now they have none.
Then we went to Kennet, Missouri.
Now that's a town of 10 or 12,000 people.
Their hospital closed five years ago now.
Then we went to Ducktown, Tennessee, a place just as small as it sounds, but it had more of a regional medical center.
It served several small rural counties there in Tennessee.
And the impact is similar to all of these hospitals.
First of all, you lose your health care.
So if you have an emergency, whether it's a heart attack or a stroke or a car accident, your access to emergency care is limited.
You've gone from having an emergency room maybe five minutes away to 30 minutes or 40 minutes or possibly farther.
We talk to people that truly believe that their loved ones died because they got in the ambulance ride and had to ride 45 minutes to the next hospital down the road.
So that's one problem.
Diagnostics.
That's the next problem.
Diagnostics.
You know, mammograms, colonoscopies, things that routinely happen at local hospitals.
If you have to go five minutes to get those things done, people do it.
No big deal.
But if they have to drive 30 or 40 minutes and wait and take a day off from work, Oftentimes they don't do it.
So your incidents of heart disease, of diabetes, of cancer, they increase.
People die.
People die from not going to the emergency room.
People die from not getting diagnosed properly.
So these things happen.
And then the kicker on all of this, when one of these hospitals closes, you lose three, four, five hundred people.
Jobs lost in a community that really can't withstand it.
Kent, Missouri was just so...
Wounded by the loss of its hospital.
Because a town of 10,000 people, 12,000 people losing 500 jobs is devastating on top of everything else.
And those are things that people just don't take into consideration, I guess.
Yeah, and I can imagine it's not just the 500 or 600 jobs.
There's, I'm sure, an entire auxiliary economy surrounding the hospital, such as the shops.
Yeah, the burger shop closes, the pizza shop closes, the laundromat goes out of business.
All of those things go away.
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Let me ask you this.
So you said during your initial conversation you found that the vaccine mandate from the federal government was exacerbating the pressures that already existed.
What did you find is the underlying reason that so many hospitals are closing?
Or is it one reason?
Is it multiple reasons?
There's multiple reasons.
There's not one group to blame.
Bad policies from the government, that's certainly a problem.
For example, you'll learn in this film that back in the 1980s and 90s when you got reimbursed, For medical from the government, be it Medicaid or Medicare, whatever it might be.
It usually took a month or so, was fairly straightforward, and got done.
Fast forward to today, and these hospitals now have entire departments to try to get their reimbursements from the government, which by the way, the government drops the reimbursement rates every year, making them smaller and smaller and smaller.
Basically, and you'll hear this in the film, They've set rates so low that if hospitals took those rates set by the government as reimbursement rates for the indigent and the people that show up at the emergency room and so forth that have no way to pay, that it would force the hospital into insolvency, into bankruptcy, because the rates are so low.
And in addition to that, these hospitals have to create entire departments where they put resources and money just so they can do all the paperwork and file all the regulations, get everything done just to get back the money that's a fraction of what it used to be.
So there's one problem.
Another problem, big businesses, hospitals and conglomerations.
They put a group of hospitals together.
A big hospital group will come in and buy three or four hospitals.
They'll look at them.
And this happened in Kennet, Missouri.
The hospital was in the black by about $5 million, but it wasn't in the black as far as some of the other hospitals owned by that group.
So they shut it down because it wasn't profitable enough.
And they said, well, people will drive farther.
So you've got government policies, big business, and of course you've got the insurance companies in there.
They're always fighting to say no, as you know.
So there's different people and different organizations that are to blame for this crisis of healthcare in America.
And then, of course, the indigent people that I mentioned that don't pay for the services they take, that also weighs on the system.
It comes down to the fact you've got all of these expensive services and machinery and people and specialized equipment, and the financial lifeblood just isn't there for a variety of reasons.
It's complex.
Steve, the first issue you mentioned was the fact that every single year the federal government renegotiates with hospitals, I guess, across the country for their reimbursement rates.
Does that create a situation where, let's say, In a rural community or, let's say, a rural county where maybe the median income is below a certain threshold and most of the people are, which you would at least, based on the statistical tables, say in poverty, they qualify for Medicare.
I think we're good to go.
It certainly does.
I mean, look, you've got insurance companies that are trying to say no to every claim they possibly can, and they slow it down.
You've got the government that slows down its payment system with all sorts of new regulations every year.
And you mentioned again what I just highlighted, and that is they come in with lower and lower rates.
So, for example...
In Ducktown, Tennessee, we spoke to the mayor of that town.
Again, the Copper Region Medical Center closed about five years ago as well.
It served several smaller counties.
Ducktown's a very small town of about 1,000 people, but it served, you know, a group of smaller counties and people came in from all over.
And they had a high incidence of poverty, like you mentioned.
Exactly right.
And when somebody would walk through the door, the reimbursement rate to walk into the emergency room from the government to that hospital was $15.
$15.
And the mayor of Ducktown says, I couldn't pay a nurse a quarter of an hour for $15.
So the reimbursement rates were absurd and obscene, really, because somebody walks through the door, they get a $15 reimbursement.
You know, by the time they sit in the chair, they've spent that kind of money.
That's fascinating, because on the front end, the government, at the federal level, they laud the kind of deals they're able to negotiate with hospitals and how many more and more people they're able to get insured through Medicaid.
But it seems like on the back end, it creates a situation where, sure, you can insure an entire poor county, but the end effect might be that the local hospital will close.
That's devastating.
Right.
You can insure them at a rate that is so low that the local health care providers, and it's not just the hospitals, it's the ambulance services, which I mentioned.
You may not realize this.
A dozen ambulance services in the state of New York went bankrupt just last year.
A dozen of them gone.
Not far from where I live, in southern Michigan, just outside of Lansing.
Ambulance service went bankrupt at the end of last year, about a year ago now.
Now, another ambulance service picked up that area, but they didn't add any more ambulances or any more attendants.
So if you have a heart attack and you're 20 minutes south of Lansing, Michigan, they might send an ambulance, but it might take 15 minutes to get there, or 20.
It's a heart attack.
You don't have that kind of time, is my point.
So the requirements to have an ambulance license is you offer 24-hour service.
You have somebody on staff 24 hours.
That's another challenge for these ambulance services because they can't find enough qualified people that want to take the rate of pay that's available to be an EMT to be in the ambulance.
So they're being decertified.
And so this is happening all over.
So does it even matter if the hospital's there if you can't get a ride in the ambulance to get there in the first place?
That's a question we have to also address as a nation.
Steve, is there any silver lining here?
here because I can imagine a situation where if you have all these hospitals shutting down and all across the country, maybe the staff, of course, leave and the business liquidates, but then the infrastructure is still there.
You still have the building.
You still have it equipped for, at least theoretically, for everything that a hospital or an emergency medical center would need.
Is there anyone who is taking advantage of this pre-built infrastructure to come in and I don't even know what it would look like, but like implementing a business model that makes sense to sort of take advantage of the situation?
Well, in the places that we stopped, we've seen the full spectrum, okay?
In Kennett, Missouri, unfortunately, that hospital, five years on, has become a...
Center of crime, homelessness, addiction.
Widows are busted out.
We walk through this hulk of a building, and you could smell smoke.
We didn't see anything.
You could see people scurrying around this and that, but there's homeless people and criminals and so forth and drug addicts and all that going on in there.
Ducktown, Tennessee, the building is still in pretty good shape.
They've kept it up, trying to turn it into a VA hospital or some sort of a medical health care facility of some sort.
And then in Massillon, Ohio, a really remarkable thing, that community hospital was kept in very good shape, and a group of philanthropists have come in and said, listen, we're going to invest millions of dollars and put this hospital back together and open it back up.
I don't think that's common, but it does happen.
And there are people out there willing to put themselves out there and resurrect a hospital from the grave, if you will, which they're doing in Massillon, Ohio.
For the people in Ducktown, they're still hopeful.
But for the people in Kenton, Missouri, that hospital's gone.
The building has been destroyed, and it's, from what I can tell, there's no way to bring it back.
It's beyond being salvaged.
So we've seen the full spectrum out there, Roman.
Wow.
Even with the Ohio example you gave, it seemed like, I mean, you said philanthropists, so I imagine they haven't figured out a profitable business model to resurrect the hospital.
So it's still kind of a burning money enterprise.
It is.
It's people that have the ability who grew up in that town.
And the thing about Maslin, it was a steel town.
It was a manufacturing town.
And back in the 30s and 40s, we hear this story in the documentary.
We share this with everybody.
The people that would go to work every day threw a dollar or two from their paycheck into the hospital fund for years and years to pay for it.
So the people that built Massillon, Ohio, built the hospital.
And then later, that hospital was taken away from the very people and the families that helped create it in the first place.
So I tip my hat to the folks that are coming in.
I tip my hat to the folks that are coming in to save this hospital.
It's one community.
It's one step.
At least it's a step in the right direction.
Is it going to be a profitable business model?
Well, as I've told you, that's a tough hill to climb based on the government, the business environment, the insurance companies.
I guess time will tell.
Wow.
So, Steve, I guess, last question.
As you were making this documentary, can you share with the audience maybe one or two stories that really stuck out with you and sort of hit you in the heart?
Yeah, sure, absolutely.
There are two that come to mind.
One was a woman who, she worked at the hospital.
Her daughter worked at the hospital.
Her sister-in-law worked at the hospital.
And in 2016, she lived fairly close, a few blocks away.
Her husband had a heart attack, went to the emergency room there, and this is in Kenna, Missouri.
And he survived.
The year after the hospital closed, and the hospital closed in 2018, the year after the hospital closed, he suffered another heart attack, very similar.
And, of course, the hospital's closed, the ER is gone, so they loaded him in the ambulance for the 45-minute ride to the next hospital down the road, and quite simply, he did not make it.
He didn't get the medical treatment he needed.
In that window of time, they needed to have it.
So that was a very sad story.
We went to the cemetery with her and talked about the loss.
And she talked about other losses and the loss of the jobs and so forth.
And then there was a young man, a police officer in Kennet, who was born at the hospital.
Whose daughter was the second last to be born at the hospital, who says we're still hoping and fighting for this community, but he said, you know, it's hard to replace those jobs.
He's a police officer.
And so they've got the building that's full of, you know, homeless folks and addicts and criminals and all sorts of things going on.
It's kind of the dustbin of humanity in a way.
It's just collected everybody that had no place else to go.
And he said it's sad.
And they don't like to go in there as police officers because they never know what they're going to find.
They find people that have felony warrants.
They find people that are jacked up on drugs and different things.
And those two stories really hit home with me.
The woman that lost her husband and the gentleman that's still in his community became a police officer to stay in Kennett.
To fight for his town, he says, we can save this town.
He goes, I don't know how we're going to get there, but we can save this town.
And those two stories really stick with me.
Wow.
You know, Steve, you really opened my eyes because I grew up...
and the Cleveland Clinic is such a big institution over there.
I mean, it has its own zip code.
It's its own little town.
Plus, you have the university hospital system as well as several others.
So I always, and I live now in New York City, so I always kind of envision the hospital system as this really sort of strong economic force.
That's hard to do anything away with because I always imagine that, hey, since the population is generally aging, people are living longer.
And of course, you have the baby boomers going into older age, that it's like the best industry to be in, the medical industry.
But I guess I didn't think of the other side of that coin, which is that a lot of areas in the rural community are not experiencing that boom.
Well, you make a couple of really good points there, Rowan.
First of all, American health care Is the best in the world if you can get it.
That's true.
That's why people come here from all over the world to get heart surgeries and transplants and whatever they do.
American medical, the healthcare in America is the best in the world.
The question is, can you get access?
You look at that.
And then you look at the Cleveland Clinic.
That's why I say it's the best in the world.
That's the kind of place that delivers the best health care in the world.
The question is, can you get there to get it done?
And so that's an important consideration as you look at the big picture.
Yeah, you grew up in the shadow of the Cleveland Clinic.
Other people grew up in the shadow of a hospital that's been closed for five or ten years.
Two different worlds out there.
Yeah, and I can imagine that there's a bit of brain drain as well when the hospital closes down.
All those trained nurses and doctors, I mean, they might take a local job at a restaurant, I guess, or any other industry that's there, but more than likely they'll just move to somewhere where there is a hospital and, you know, it'll be a brain drain for that.
Once a community loses that hospital, an industry comes to look at an area, say, do we want to invest and build our company here?
One of the first things they look at, of course, is what is the access to healthcare, certainly with an aging population.
If you don't have a hospital, if you don't have healthcare, you're not on the list for people to come and open a factory or open a new production facility or open anything for that matter.
They go to where the healthcare is, to where the services are, so they can have that infrastructure.
If it's not there, it's like the final insult, the final injury.
It really is.
Well, if anyone watching this is interested in checking out the documentary, which I would highly recommend you do, I'll throw a link to it.
It'll be down there in the description box below.
Otherwise, Steve, thank you so much for joining us.
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