Matt Forge: Healthy Idaho Plan a lifesaver for rural hospitals

As the chief administrative officer for St. Mary’s Hospital in Cottonwood, Idaho, I see firsthand the struggle that many of our family members, neighbors and friends go through to get the basic medical care they need.

These are hard-working members of our community who make a good wage but don’t have health insurance provided through their employer. They are one medical crisis, one emergency room visit away from financial ruin. Closing the coverage gap and adopting the Healthy Idaho Plan will provide many Idahoans with the care they need to be healthy, productive members of our state. It would save taxpayers money and preserve access to essential care by making sure our rural hospitals are able to continue providing vital medical services.

Rural hospitals are suffering from high uncompensated care burdens, and closing the coverage gap can help these critical care providers keep their doors open so they can continue to serve everyone in their communities. St Mary’s is no exception. Our ability to cover costs of catastrophic care for the uninsured is being strained. We don’t bring in a lot of revenue from primary care, but if we were able to provide it to the members of our community who fall within the coverage gap it would make the population healthier and make the financial situation of the hospital more solvent.

Some argue that if a hospital can’t stay afloat financially then it shouldn’t stay open; that’s what the market dictates. That’s a fine abstract, but the real-life implication of a rural hospital closing is that folks in our communities would lose access to critical health care services. In a state as rural as Idaho, limiting access to providers, causing people to have to travel for any level of care, will have real life consequences.

The region St. Mary’s serves is made of small communities like Cottonwood, and our economy, like a lot of places in rural Idaho, is a family-based traditional market. Many of the jobs our residents have are in farming, forestry and construction. These jobs pay a living wage, but do not always provide health care for employees. Those Idahoans who make too much money to qualify for our existing Medicaid program and too little to receive a tax credit under our state exchange are left with very few options. Almost 20 percent of our area’s residents fall within the coverage gap, but it doesn’t need to be this way.

Passing the Healthy Idaho Plan would maintain access to quality health care services in the rural sections of our state and provide coverage to many hard-working Idahoans (66 percent of those in the gap have full-time jobs). Moreover, all projections commissioned by Gov. Butch Otter’s Medicaid working group show that implementing the Healthy Idaho Plan will save the taxpayers over $100 million over the next nine years, and improve the overall health of Idahoans.

While there is talk of a supplemental plan that would provide access to primary care providers to our gap population, it does not cover treatment or medications and will do little to keep patients out of the emergency room. In a state that already has inadequate access to care in our more rural areas, we simply cannot risk losing any more ground and we must do better than simply implementing token improvements to our health care system.

Matt Forge is the chief administrative officer of St. Mary’s Hospital and Clinics in Cottonwood, Idaho.