Please find enclosed Alabama Public Radio’s entry for the APME Award for best series, titled “Alabama's Rural Health Care Concerns.”
The three member Alabama Public Radio spent the year, with no budget, investigating why the system here is so badly broken and why solutions aren’t being pursued. On September 27, 2017, the Washington Post published an article about how only one half of rural hospitals in the U.S. can deliver a baby.
In rural Alabama, it’s barely a third.
The National Rural Health Association says Alabama is “ground zero” for most of what’s wrong with rural healthcare in the nation. Studies frequently list Alabama as having the highest infant mortality rate and the highest number of diabetics in the U.S. In 2016, the city of Gadsden, east of Birmingham, had the lowest life expectancy in the country. Despite these trends, rural hospitals in Alabama receive among the lowest reimbursements from Medicare. The result is that 80% of these healthcare facilities are operating in the red. As a result, rural residents of Alabama frequently go without treatment. Some are reduced to seeking medical care from their veterinarians to avoid long lines or co-pays they can’t afford.
The APR news team focused on the impact of the lack of healthcare in Alabama’s rural communities, and possible remedies. Seven rural counties in Alabama don’t have hospitals, forcing residents to drive an hour or more for basic treatment. One reason is that Alabama requires hospitals to have at least fifteen beds, even if smaller facilities would be more financially self-sustaining. Mississippi, by contrast, allows hospitals with as a few as three beds. I visited the one in the town of Leakesville is serving the community and turning a profit. Only sixteen of Alabama’s fifty four rural counties have a hospital that can deliver a baby.
I focused on the problems that means for expectant mothers, and the urban hospitals that carry the load surrounding rural counties can’t. Rural Bibb Medical Center juggled its budget and reopened its labor and delivery unit five years after it stopped birthing babies. However, threats to the Affordable Care Act, which makes this unique business model possible, threaten its future. Challenges in rural medicine in Alabama seem recent, but they’re not.
APR’s Stan Ingold reports 2017 was the forty fifth anniversary of the Associated Press story that uncovered the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment where African Americans in rural Macon County, Alabama went untreated so researchers could track the progression of the disease. 2017 also marked twenty years since President Bill Clinton’s official White House apology. The scandal changed forever how human trials are used to test new medicines and treatments all Americans use. It also prompted African American distrust of the medical industry that persists nationally, to this day.
APR’s Alex AuBuchon also examined telemedicine as a way to bring physicians to far flung rural counties. However, a lack of internet bandwidth might prevent this solution from working. There’s also a program that seeks out rural candidates for medical school and encourages them to practice in their rural hometowns. Still, a lack of scholarships forces fifty percent of these rural graduates to pursue specialties in urban areas to pay off student debt.
Respectfully submitted,
Pat Duggins
News Director
Alabama Public Radio