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The facts about Rural Health Care
Governor Reynolds has declared November 21, 2024 Rural Health Day. These are some brutal truths not included in the governor's Proclamation:
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Nearly four of every ten Iowans live in rural Iowa.
- Three quarters of Iowa's rural hospitals are operating in the red.
- One third of our 99 counties no longer offer maternity services.
- Among the six Upper Midwest states, Iowa has the lowest number of physicians/100,000 residents.
- Iowa lawmakers have barred the opening of new nursing homes since June 2023.
- One third of Iowa's doctors are already aged 60 and older.
- We will need 25,000+ additional health care workers by 2032, because 23 percent of all job growth will be in health care.
- Iowa's working age cohort will shrink by 33,300 over this decade, a decline that began in 2016 and will continue until 2031.
- It will be 2036 before we once again reach today's number of workers in Iowa.
If the purpose of a Proclamation is to raise awareness, encourage engagement and even offer solutions, this one missed the target. By a lot. There is an expanding array of innovative strategies that would enable rural patients and providers to make the best and highest use of available resources. What the governor failed to proclaim was that public and private leadership would work to identify and implement those solutions to safeguard the well-being of rural Iowans and to preserve their social and economic infrastructure.
This forty percent of Iowans deserve more than tedious platitudes for one day a year. The crisis of health care access for Iowans—urban and rural—has been willfully ignored by our policy makers and stakeholders for decades. While it is still possible to avoid or reduce devastation from this entirely foreseeable disaster, make no mistake: The perfect storm of demographics, dwindling resources and systemic fails is no longer approaching—it is here.
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