Nov. 23, 2023 - Epoch Times
06:09
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| Time | Text |
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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 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 on 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 size, 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. | |
| We'll say that. | |
| Kennet, 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. |
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