City Folks

[kevin_standlee]

My insurance has a case worker following up on my recovery from my hernia surgery. When she asked about my doctor and the endocrinologist to which my doctor has referred me, I mentioned in passing that it is 40 miles one way to the medical center, and the case worker said, "That's awfully far away! Can't we find you someone closer?" I laughed and said, "I live around 30 miles from the center of Reno, Nevada. I don't live in San Francisco or San Jose or Atlanta or Chicago. 40 miles isn't far at all. There's a place in Nevada called Tonopah that is more than 200 miles from the nearest hospital and has billboards advertising emergency medical air ambulance transport to Las Vegas."

She seemed a bit stunned by the idea that anyone lived that far away from a hospital. "Oh, you sweet summer child," I thought, but did not say. "You don't know anything about how rural much of the West is."

Comments

[arlesstra]

It's a significant problem that's only getting much worse all over as hospitals and medical centers shut down and available physicians are overloaded and out-of-network.

A recent example: https://rolanni.dreamwidth.org/1448332.html

[lindadee]

A few years ago I met a relative who lived on a mountain ranch in Colorado, quite a way aways from medical care, and they were not young. I'm grateful I live about half a mile from a major hospital.

[voidampersand]

Some of my relatives lived where it was an 85 mile drive for them to get groceries.

[madfilkentist]

And here in a small New England town, I was annoyed when the number of drugstores within a mile dropped from three to two...

[jreynoldsward]

Nods. My local hospital is a critical care center. Anything more gets referred to bigger hospitals 200 miles away.

[belak]

Bless her heart!

I have been known to ask the clerk on the phone "can you show me where the nearest (whatever we're talking about) is to my location in Fernley? I'll wait while you look". I hear clicking in the background and then hear them say "Oh, well, Reno IS the closest location to you!" or ask them to pull up a map and look at the satellite view to see ALLLLL the nothing around that location. ;-)

Santa Clara County just reopened Regional Center on the east side after several previous owners shut down over various times, or bowed out. It is about as desolate an area for medical care considering many people on the east side don't have vehicles to get to and from a hospital or urgent care. A 3 hour bus ride on VTA while you're urping up your guts isn't something most would do. Then the other day, San Jose introduced a new "pay to play" to bill residents for calling 9-1-1 and requesting services like EMS "like many other emergency services already charge across the nation" of a minimum of about $500 per call, that will not be covered by insurance. Someone got chippy with the mayor that "we already pay taxes for such services". I get it, the City is trying to maintain a budget and too many are "Frequent Flyers" using EMS as a taxi service or a ride to the hospital to get a hangnail looked at. I digress a bit, but hospital care isn't available for everyone "just up the street", and it is sad your case worker did not realise this tidbit.

[msconduct]

That seems surprisingly ignorant. In NZ you can easily live four hours' drive from a hospital and it's taken for granted that emergencies will require helicopter transport (although you don't have to pay for them). And that's in a country only around 268,000 square kilometres large. Granted, it's extremely mountainous with a sparse population in most places, but still, I'd have thought you'd assume in the wide spaces of the US that the same would apply in many places.