Weeds have punctured through the vacant parking lot of Martin General Hospital’s emergency room. A makeshift blue tarp covering the hospital’s sign is worn down from flapping in the wind. The hospital doors are locked, many in this county of 22,000 fear permanently....
This issue is a bit more complex than just "hospitals shouldn't be for profit". Not to dismiss that's a big driver here, but there's a lot more going on.
Rural communities tend to have lower insurance coverage, that means for the people who do show up, their debt will eventually go into collections or be completely written off as a loss. Rural communities have vastly less access to better insurance and many just completely forgo insurance altogether.
Additionally, rural communities have a tendency to enter a death spiral between visits and costs. The number of people showing up at the hospital is low, but for the ones that do they show up with incredibly expensive conditions.
A lot of the financing and extended lines of revenue for rural hospitals is tied into the expanded Medicaid offerings under the Affordable Care Act (ACA). There's clear demonstration that states that have opted to not expand Medicaid are the ones overwhelmingly facing hospital closures. States that have expanded still face issues, but states that have not are facing worse outcomes for rural hospitals.
Finally, costs for healthcare have steadily increased at rates that outpace pretty much every program out there. Pharmaceutical companies are ever shifting costs of materials and medication making long term planning difficult. These companies cite new regulation requiring a remixing of their costs of products. Basically, if some state mandates $30 insulin, that makes cancer treatment go up some, massive percentage. So a requirement to reduce cost to consumer in one area induces an increase in cost somewhere else.
And no just telling hospitals they can't drive a profit won't fix the issue. The doctors, insurance, coverage, politics over the ACA, the education of those doctors, the supply chain of the hospitals, and the production of medical supplies all have played a role in this. There's just thousands of things that have to change or we're going to see more of this.
The entire thing is predicated on a completely unsustainable economic model. This system we have is completely unsustainable. It was never sustainable, it's just that the losses had to eventually add up enough to run the thing into the ground. And this isn't limited to just Red States, it's just that the Red States are the ones least prepared for this slowly building problem. This issue is coming for everywhere. There's no hospital that's going to survive this if we do not fundamentally change the system upon which our healthcare is built on.
There are just too many flaws to band-aid here. We have to have a massive overhaul of our system or people are literally going to die. The problem is, that we can't tell who is going to be at the steering wheel to direct those changes. There has to be a shared vision between the two major political parties that can endure for decades to ensure that whatever new systems is made, is actually built. If the two parties that run our government can never agree, hang it up folks, we're done here. I know some people are going to take that as an invite to bash the other party, but at the end of the day, we either all work together or we don't.
We have to have some sort of change to our system like yesterday. It needs to be a massive change that take effect at ALL of the layers within the healthcare system. We cannot keep making minor incremental changes, it's just plugging one hole in the dam only for another one to spring forth.
The Basque Country’s Mondragón Corporation is the globe’s largest industrial co-operative, with workers paying for the right to share in its profits – and its losses. In return for giving more to their employer, they expect more back.
There is a book "From Mondragon to America" which goes into excruciating detail about how it all works. It's not just a few factories there are credit unions, food coops and more all doing business together.
The headline is misleading. Roku didn’t get hacked and leak accounts. There were ~15000 customers that had accounts accessed due to credential stuffing. Aka, they reused passwords on other sites that had leaks and hackers tried those credentials on their Roku accounts and got into them.
After the only hospital in town closed, a North Carolina city directs its ire at politicians (apnews.com)
Weeds have punctured through the vacant parking lot of Martin General Hospital’s emergency room. A makeshift blue tarp covering the hospital’s sign is worn down from flapping in the wind. The hospital doors are locked, many in this county of 22,000 fear permanently....
Lewis Black Gives Elon's Cybertruck Two Middle Fingers Up - Back in Black | The Daily Show (www.youtube.com)
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‘In the US they think we’re communists!’ The 70,000 workers showing the world another way to earn a living (www.theguardian.com)
The Basque Country’s Mondragón Corporation is the globe’s largest industrial co-operative, with workers paying for the right to share in its profits – and its losses. In return for giving more to their employer, they expect more back.
The Squonk (lemmy.world)
Real Starfleet Heroes: T'Rul (lemmy.world)
Remember to recycle [hot paper comics] (lemmy.world)
X: x.com/HotPaperComics
Solar panels during the 2024 total solar eclipse (slrpnk.net)
‘I really wasn’t worried’: US man was getting vasectomy as earthquake struck (www.theguardian.com)
cross-posted from: feddit.uk/post/10087746...
Yes, I'm this old (lemmy.world)
One day late (feddit.de)
Originally be German cartoonist Martin Perscheid (Website), translated into English by me....
Eastern tube-nosed bat mom and baby. Unlike other fruit bats, tube-nosed bats roost alone; they like to eat flowers and fruit (lemmy.world)
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Gonna tell my grandkids this was Star Trek: Voyager (lemmy.world)
Phoenix (lemmy.world)
The Apple Jonathan: A Very 1980s Concept Computer That Never Shipped (lemmy.ml)
This concept envisioned a computer that would expand with the needs of the user, through the use of modular components...
When your DM has been posting on NCD
Happy Pi Day!
It’s March 14th! An excellent day to eat pie and do maths. I might brush up on my geometry and try the NASA Pi Day Challenge.
Master Kenobi doesn't poison his body with spice (lemmy.dbzer0.com)
You know what this meme reminds me of? Dinah Shore's song that she sings into the recording machine in Up in Arms. (lemmy.world)
And yes, that reference does apply. So there.
Roku got hacked (www.theverge.com)
CALLED IT
Dune Part Deux basically (feddit.de)
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I'd watch an entire episode of Wormhole X-treme BTS (sh.itjust.works)
harbinger of the rule (lemmy.one)