Living in a pretty good-size city and having good health insurance, I pretty much had my pick of hospitals to deliver my kids. The one we chose had opened a new wing with an incredibly nice mother-baby unit shortly before I delivered my daughter – and went all private rooms in the intervening three years before I gave birth to my son. Faaancy.
But in rural areas, some hospitals are dropping childbirth care altogether. While it’s usually a pretty big profit center for hospitals, according to this article from Northeast Georgia, some small hospitals are finding the expense of providing obstetrics exceeds what they could make from the small number of patients they see.
Kevin Bloye, spokesman for the Georgia Hospital Association, said, "It’s a tough time to be a rural hospital. The important factor is payer mix. In rural areas especially, the base of insured patients is shrinking. You need to have enough insured patients to offset the cost of treating Medicaid and uninsured patients."
That’s right, the healthcare crisis rears its ugly head again.
It’s not that pregnant women will have nowhere to go – two fairly nearby hospitals just opened new obstetrics units – but for people who maybe wanted a smaller, closer to home experience, that’s got to be a blow. And not only that, but they just announced this month that they’d stop delivering babies on Dec. 9. I was pretty amped up on hormones near the end, and if someone announced I would have to go elsewhere very close to the end of my pregnancy I would have lost it. Waiting out a due date is hard enough without wondering if your hospital will still be open.
