https://www.healthcaredive.com/news/gao-rural-hospital-closures-increasing-south-hardest-hit/538604/

Dive Brief:

• Hospitals across the U.S. are being battered by financial headwinds, and rural hospitals are vulnerable because they don’t have capital or diversified services to fall back on when the going gets rough. Between 2013 and 2017, 64 rural hospitals closed due to financial distress and changing healthcare dynamics, more than twice the number in the previous five years, a new Government Accountability Office analysis shows.  
• Rural hospital closures disproportionately occurred in the South, among for-profit hospitals and among organizations with a Medicare-dependent hospital payment designation.
• One potential lifeline was Medicaid expansion. According to GAO, just 17% of rural hospital closures occurred in states that had expanded Medicaid as of April 2018.

Dive Insight:

Declining inpatient admissions and reimbursement cuts have taken a toll on rural hospitals. Since 2010, 86 rural hospitals have closed, and 44% of those remaining are operating at a loss — up from 40% in 2017.

CMS Administrator Seema Verma released a rural health strategy in May aimed at improving access and quality of care in rural communities. Among its objectives are expanding telemedicine, empowering patients in rural areas to take responsibility for their health and leveraging partnerships to advance rural health goals.

The agency also expanded its Rural Community Hospital Demonstration from 17 to 30 hospitals. The program reimburses hospitals for the actual cost of inpatient services rather than standard Medicare rate, which could be as little as 80% of actual cost.

Such initiatives can be helpful, but if a hospital can’t make ends meet on its Medicare and Medicaid businesses and has only a modicum of privately insured patients, “that’s just not a balance that works financially,” Diane Calmus, government affairs and policy manager at the National Rural Health Association, told Healthcare Dive recently.

In all, 49 rural hospitals closed in the South, or 77% of rural hospital closures from 2013 through 2017, according to GAO. Texas had the most closures with 14, followed by Tennessee with eight and Georgia and Mississippi, each with five. By contrast, there were eight rural hospital closures in the Midwest and four each in the West and Northeast.

GAO also looked at closures by Medicare rural hospital payment designation. Critical access hospitals made up 36% of rural hospital closures, 30% were hospitals receiving Medicare standard inpatient payment, 25% had Medicare-dependent hospital designation and 9% were sole community hospitals.

To aid rural hospitals and ensure access for patients, NRHA has urged CMS to adopt a common sense approach to the “exclusive use” standard and lobbied lawmakers to pass legislation eliminating the 96-hour condition of payment requirement, two policies that are particularly hard on rural providers.

Another bill, the Save Rural Hospitals Act, would reverse reimbursement cuts to rural hospitals, provide other regulatory relief and establish the community outpatient hospital, a new provider type offering 24/7 emergency services plus outpatient and primary care.