[From article]
After 45 years of providing health care in rural western Missouri, Sac-Osage Hospital is being sold piece by piece.
Ceiling tiles are going for 25 cents, the room doors for an average of less than $4 each, the patient beds for $250 apiece. Soon, the remnants of the hospital that long symbolized the lifeblood of Osceola, population 923, will be torn to the ground.
Sac-Osage is one of a growing number of rural U.S. hospitals closing their doors, citing a complex combination of changing demographics, medical practices, management decisions and federal policies that have put more financial pressure on facilities that sometimes average only a few in-patients a day.
"Money just kept drying up," said Chris Smiley, a former operating room nurse who was the last chief executive of Sac-Osage and is now overseeing its liquidation.
A total of 50 hospitals in the rural U.S. have closed since 2010, and the pace has been accelerating, with more closures in the past two years than in the previous 10 years combined, according to the National Rural Health Association. That could be just the beginning of what some health care analysts fear will be a crisis.
http://abcnews.go.com/Health/wireStory/rural-hospitals-struggle-stay-open-adapt-30724015
Rural Hospitals Struggle to Stay Open, Adapt to Changes
OSCEOLA, Mo. — May 1, 2015, 1:57 PM ET
By DAVID A. LIEB
Ceiling tiles are going for 25 cents, the room doors for an average of less than $4 each, the patient beds for $250 apiece. Soon, the remnants of the hospital that long symbolized the lifeblood of Osceola, population 923, will be torn to the ground.
Sac-Osage is one of a growing number of rural U.S. hospitals closing their doors, citing a complex combination of changing demographics, medical practices, management decisions and federal policies that have put more financial pressure on facilities that sometimes average only a few in-patients a day.
"Money just kept drying up," said Chris Smiley, a former operating room nurse who was the last chief executive of Sac-Osage and is now overseeing its liquidation.
A total of 50 hospitals in the rural U.S. have closed since 2010, and the pace has been accelerating, with more closures in the past two years than in the previous 10 years combined, according to the National Rural Health Association. That could be just the beginning of what some health care analysts fear will be a crisis.
http://abcnews.go.com/Health/wireStory/rural-hospitals-struggle-stay-open-adapt-30724015
Rural Hospitals Struggle to Stay Open, Adapt to Changes
OSCEOLA, Mo. — May 1, 2015, 1:57 PM ET
By DAVID A. LIEB
Associated Press
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