May 8, 2021 6:50pm
Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle are asking for new federal earmarks to help hospitals in their districts buy a range of new items like CT scanners or mobile health clinics. (Getty Images/Bill Chizek)
Earmarks are coming back in Congress, and nonprofit hospitals and health systems have asked lawmakers for new state-of-the-art medical equipment and expansions to behavioral health and emergency rooms.
The House Appropriations Committee released the requests from lawmakers for earmarks in the next appropriations bill. Those requests include new funding from major nonprofit hospitals and health systems for a variety of things ranging from new CT scanners to telehealth.
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Kathy Masisak, 68, doesn’t want to live in a community without robust medical care. But her local hospital in rural McKean County has been downsizing for years, and she said it’s affecting her family.
“They took a maternity ward away last year, and my granddaughter had to go to Olean which is 35, 40 minutes away in an emergency situation to deliver that baby,” Masisak said. “I was panicking the whole time going over there to see her.”
Masisak lives in Lewis Run, a borough seven miles south of Bradford, where the Bradford Regional Medical Center is about to lose even more services, including departments for acute care and surgery.
Single-Payer Reform and Rural Health in the United States: Lessons from Our Northern Neighbor
Abstract
Single-payer health reform has secured its place in the mainstream American health policy debate, yet its implications for particular subpopulations or sectors of care remain understudied. Amidst many unanswered questions from policymakers and political pundits, rural health has emerged as one such area. This article explores rural Canada’s five-decade-long experience with a national publicly funded health insurance program as a valuable opportunity for cross-national learning. During March 2020, I conducted 13 semi-structured, elite stakeholder interviews with government officials, academic researchers, rural hospital executives, public health association leaders, rural health administrators, and representatives from provincial medical, hospital, and physician associations in Ontario. I found that a single-payer model confers notable advantages over a market-based model, includ