Kristie Flowers had been sick with the flu for 4 or 5 days in July earlier than the 52-year-old registered nurse from Genoa, Colo., acknowledged she wanted to go to the ER.
At Lincoln Community Hospital, about 10 miles from her residence on the Eastern Plains of Colorado, medical doctors shortly recognized her with pneumonia and sepsis. Her proper lung had utterly crammed with fluid, and Flowers wanted way more intensive care than the 15-bed hospital might present.
Doctors stabilized Flowers and transferred her by ambulance about 80 miles away to St. Francis Medical Center in Colorado Springs. There, medical doctors put her on a ventilator for 10 days as they slowly nursed her again to well being. After two weeks, she returned to Lincoln Community Hospital for one more week of rehab earlier than going residence.
After her insurance coverage plan had paid its share, Flowers owed $eight,000 in medical payments. An enormous chunk represented the $three,500 deductible from her employer-sponsored well being plan. Never one to let the payments pile up, Flowers went to the financial institution and took out an $eight,000 mortgage to repay her medical tab.
Plans with annual deductibles of $three,000, $5,000 and even $10,000 have change into commonplace for the reason that implementation of the Affordable Care Act as insurers search for methods to maintain month-to-month premiums to a minimal. But in rural areas, the place high-deductible plans are much more prevalent and incomes are usually decrease than in city areas, sufferers usually wrestle to pay these deductibles.
That has hit sufferers like Flowers onerous as they grapple with medical debt when emergencies occur — however small rural hospitals like Lincoln Community are struggling, too. These services usually stabilize critically in poor health sufferers after which switch them to bigger regional or city hospitals for extra definitive care.
But when the hospitals submit their claims, payments from the primary web site of care usually get utilized to a affected person’s deductible. And if sufferers can’t afford to cowl that quantity, these hospitals usually don’t receives a commission, even because the bigger city hospitals the place sufferers had been transferred get near full fee from the well being plan.
“As soon as we send them to the city, those things start being paid by the insurance company,” mentioned Kevin Stansbury, CEO of Lincoln Community, “while we’re still chasing the patient around for collections.”
The result’s monetary complications for sufferers and a considerable rise within the quantity of uncollectible “bad debt” written off by all hospitals in the course of the previous few years. According to the Healthcare Financial Management Association, hospital unhealthy debt elevated by $617 million to just about $56.5 billion between 2015 and 2018. More hospitals, particularly these in rural areas, are left teetering financially.
At least 120 rural hospitals nationwide have shut down up to now decade. Without adjustments, advocates say, extra will shut, leaving sufferers equivalent to Flowers in distant areas removed from entry to fast emergency care.
Shopping On Premiums
According to the nonprofit National Rural Health Association, unhealthy debt for rural hospitals has gone up about 50% for the reason that passage of the Affordable Care Act in 2010.
“People in rural America were buying plans maybe for the first time, but buying plans they couldn’t afford,” mentioned Maggie Elehwany, the group’s vice chairman for presidency affairs and coverage. The plans “seemed to make sense at the time, until they got sick.”
Part of the issue is that buyers primarily store primarily based on month-to-month premiums, and insurance policy can decrease the month-to-month premiums they cost by rising deductibles and copays. Some customers take the gamble that they’ll keep wholesome and gained’t get caught paying the excessive deductible. But others merely might not perceive they’re sometimes chargeable for the total deductible earlier than their insurance coverage kicks in to cowl the remainder of their payments.
In many rural counties, customers purchasing on their state’s medical health insurance alternate had little selection. This 12 months, about 10% of enrollees, residing in 25% of counties, lots of them closely rural, may have entry to only one insurer of their native Affordable Care Act marketplaces, in response to a Kaiser Family Foundation analysis. (KHN is an editorially unbiased program of the inspiration.)
“The exchanges have never worked the way they were envisioned,” Elehwany mentioned. “The goal was you go on your computer and it’s going to be like buying an airline ticket, and just shopping around for what makes sense for you. There’s no shopping in rural America. You have one choice.”
In Colorado, for instance, the common deductible in 2017 was almost $5,800 for a bronze-level plan. According to an analysis by the Colorado Center on Law & Policy, 1 in four Coloradans wouldn’t be capable to afford to pay that deductible over the course of a 12 months. The potential to pay was even worse in rural areas.
Mark Holmes, director of the North Carolina Rural Health Research and Policy Analysis Center, mentioned that incomes are usually decrease in rural areas than elsewhere, and that higher-income rural residents usually tend to journey to an city hospital than to remain native. Lower-income rural residents, in the meantime, usually go to their native hospital, he mentioned, however they’re much less seemingly to have the ability to meet a excessive deductible.
Rural residents are additionally much less more likely to be coated by employer-sponsored plans and, subsequently, extra more likely to face excessive deductibles than their city counterparts.
“They may never pay us,” mentioned Stella Worley, CEO of the 25-bed Keefe Memorial Hospital in Cheyenne Wells, Colo., close to the Kansas line. “They get transferred onto high level of care and the other hospital gets paid. We get paid nothing — a lot.”
Worley recalled one affected person who had been handled and transferred to a bigger hospital. Keefe Memorial wrote off $14,000 in whole fees. The affected person was billed $1,000 for his deductible and by no means paid it. Eventually, the unpaid invoice went to a set company, which takes a 30% reduce if it ever collects the payment.
For many rural residents, paying a month-to-month premium and nonetheless dealing with hundreds of dollars in out-of-pocket prices can really feel like having no insurance coverage in any respect. As a end result, sufferers keep away from looking for main care companies that might clear up minor issues earlier than they devolve into main well being points with a lot increased prices.
“Some of the people I know in our community trying to get insurance for their employees had a $10,000 deductible, which is really catastrophic insurance,” mentioned Rob Santilli, CEO of Gunnison Valley Health, in Gunnison, Colo. “It’s not going to help them, and it immediately puts them into bad debt with the first instance when they need coverage.”
To ensure, non-rural hospitals have additionally seen a rise in unhealthy debt. But most metropolis hospitals are half of a bigger well being system and might climate the storm higher than small, unbiased rural hospitals working on razor-thin margins.
Colorado has up to now averted the agricultural hospital closures which have plagued different states. Nonetheless, 22 rural hospitals in Colorado operated within the purple final 12 months, in response to Michelle Mills, CEO of the Colorado Rural Health Center. That’s double the quantity in 2018.
“We’re definitely at a tipping point,” Mills mentioned.
Finding Solutions
Hospital and rural well being teams throughout Colorado are lobbying for adjustments in insurance coverage plan designs to avoid the impression from high-deductible plans. Lincoln Community’s Stansbury recommended that main care companies, which assist preserve rural hospitals afloat and sufferers wholesome, must be exempt from the deductible to encourage sufferers to maintain up with their care.
Another choice can be simplifying billing so insurance policy would pay hospital and physician payments immediately and ship sufferers a single invoice of what they owe. That strategy would clear up a standard criticism from sufferers who wrestle to reconcile a number of payments from numerous hospitals, medical doctors and different well being care suppliers that stem from a single episode of care. It would additionally shift the burden of gathering the affected person’s portion of the invoice to insurance coverage corporations, and defend the hospitals in opposition to uncollectible unhealthy debt, leveling the taking part in area for the agricultural hospitals.
The Colorado Hospital Association is working with a number of state legislators to suggest that type of billing construction in the course of the 2020 legislative session. Stansbury mentioned the strategy would additionally enable rural hospitals to concentrate on affected person care moderately than making an attempt to gather funds.
“We just don’t have the expertise for billing,” he mentioned. “We do it badly.”
The National Rural Health Association favors requiring insurance policy that supply Medicare and Medicaid plans in rural areas to additionally supply alternate plans in these counties. If rural customers had extra choices, they may be capable to keep away from high-deductible plans.
That might decrease unhealthy debt for rural hospitals and pay dividends far past well being care, Elehwany mentioned.
“When you’ve got a small rural hospital and it closes, it’s a nail in the coffin of that rural community,” she mentioned. “How are you going to attract a business? How are you going to keep your school if you don’t have physicians? In rural America, health care is really part of the whole infrastructure of the community.”
