A USA TODAY analysis found that new cases have been confirmed at faster rates in rural and nonmetropolitan counties. But rural communities - like Clay County, Georgia - experts say, may be on the brink of disaster.
At Dr. Karen Kinsell’s southwest Georgia practice, patients showing coronavirus symptoms have infiltrated an appointment schedule usually crowded with bladder infections and sinus trouble.
At least 130 rural hospitals have closed nationally in the past decade, according to the University of North Carolina Sheps Center for Health Services Research. “There’s no way a hospital would be viable here,” Kinsell said, because the county has too few residents. “There are hospitals in two adjoining counties that have high infection rates,” she said. “I don’t know how they stay open.”
She refers those with coronavirus indicators to hospitals an hour drive away. Several have declined emergency care, fearing a bill they can’t afford. But lawmakers in states that eschewed Medicaid expansion argued they didn’t trust the federal government to reimburse them for the program’s costs. Plus, they contended, Medicaid already was plagued with problems, including low payment rates to doctors and hospitals.
In Clay County now, a lone ambulance is responsible for a territory spanning more than 200 square miles. It waits in Fort Gaines, near the state line and equidistant from the county’s farthest corners, to ferry patients east to Albany, Georgia, or southwest to Dothan, Alabama.
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