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Obamacare is forcing the closure of small rural hospitals nationwide

Finding out what’s in it: The regulations imposed by Obamacare have raised costs so much that dozens of small rural hospitals, generally serving poorer communities, have been forced to close.

Since the beginning of 2010, 43 rural hospitals — with a total of more than 1,500 beds — have closed, according to data from the North Carolina Rural Health Research Program. The pace of closures has quickened: from 3 in 2010 to 13 in 2013, and 12 already this year. Georgia alone has lost five rural hospitals since 2012, and at least six more are teetering on the brink of collapse. Each of the state’s closed hospitals served about 10,000 people — a lot for remaining area hospitals to absorb.

The Affordable Care Act was designed to improve access to health care for all Americans and will give them another chance at getting health insurance during open enrollment starting this Saturday. But critics say the ACA is also accelerating the demise of rural outposts that cater to many of society’s most vulnerable. These hospitals treat some of the sickest and poorest patients — those least aware of how to stay healthy. Hospital officials contend that the law’s penalties for having to re-admit patients soon after they’re released are impossible to avoid and create a crushing burden.

The article also describes how the high cost converting all hospital records from paper to electronic, something that Obamacare requires, is also forcing the shut down of these hospitals.

Genesis cover

On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.

 
The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.


The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
 

"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News

One comment

  • Cotour

    On the use of words and their actual meaning:

    I think the problems is that politicians and us “regular” people who pay for everything and who’s freedoms those politicians are in the process of confiscating use different dictionaries to define the words in the sentences that we use to explain what it is that we are attempting to communicate.

    For example the word TRANSPARENT apparently means that the politicians that use words can say what ever they want and tell you afterwords that you miss heard them or that what was actually meant was miss understood by the people.

    Or when the president uses the words “you will be able to keep your doctor” or “a family’s yearly healthcare costs will be reduced by $2500 dollars”
    actually means that you will have to use the doctors that your insurance company or the government say you have to use and that your costs for healthcare will actually double.

    Or when the president says that a person “was not a member of his staff” but he was a highly paid consultant who’s models were directly used to develop the ACA (OBAMACARE)

    “While Gruber was not a staffer, he was a paid consultant whose models were used to help assess the impact of various policy changes being considered as part of health care legislation. Official logs show he visited the White House about a dozen times between 2009 and this year.”

    Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2014/11/barack-obama-health-care-112930.html#ixzz3JFS5wLv2

    Or when a law is written, represented and defended as a penalty but judged and rewritten to be a tax by a certain Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.

    So yes WE THE PEOPLE have a problem, it is our responsibility to correct the “mistaken” (read, how lawyers are trained to lie) way that politicians use the English language. Words actually mean what their definitions are and when they are used to create sentences to communicate ideas and concepts you will be held accountable for the words that you use in those sentences.

    And when you use words to deceive “the stupid American public”, as Mr. Gruber so inconveniently revealed you will pay a heavy price when “the stupid” give their feedback at the ballot box. That is how we get on the same page and begin using the same dictionary.

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