Paul Krugman: Self-Inflicted Medical Misery Red America's homemade rural health crisis.

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Link to tweet

[Wounded Bear]

1. It starts with the basic conservative philosophy...

that anything worth having is worth paying for, and if you can't afford to pay for it, you don't deserve it.

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2. Because this is behind a pay wall

readers here without a subscription are left wondering what this is even about. Could you give us a clue?

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7. Yeah. I used my 5 free articles for the month

in the first week. It used to be 10 articles.

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4. Sorry.... here is the end

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/24/opinion/republican-states-health-care.html

"SNIP...

(state decisions not to expand medicaide with federal dollars)

Some of it may reflect the general meanspiritedness, the embrace of cruelty, that was already infecting the G.O.P. even before Donald Trump, and has now become one of the party’s defining traits. Yes, that’s harsh, but you know that it’s true.

There’s also, I suspect, an element of cynical calculation. As I said, rural voters often complain that national elites don’t care about their needs. Well, one way to make people feel hostile toward those elites is to block their access to federal benefits, and hope they don’t realize who’s actually causing their misery.

Is it conceivable that conservative politicians have that much contempt for their base? Yes.

In any case, the point is that while rural decline in general is a hard problem, with no easy answers, rescuing rural health care isn’t hard at all. We know how to ensure that rural Americans get the health care they need. This isn’t a problem of policy, it’s a problem of politics — and most of the blame lies with Republican state governments.

.....SNIP"

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6. Thank you! n/t

[DBoon]

5. excerpt from original ny times article

Over the weekend The Washington Post published a heart-rending description of a pop-up medical clinic in Cleveland, Tenn. — a temporary installation providing free care for two days on a first-come-first-served basis. Hundreds of people showed up many hours before the clinic opened, because rural America is suffering from a severe crisis of health care availability, with hospitals closing and doctors leaving.

Since the focus of the report was on personal experience, not policy, it’s understandable that the article mentioned only in passing the fact that Tennessee is one of the 14 states that still refuse to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act. So I’m not sure how many readers grasped the reality that America’s rural health care crisis is largely — not entirely, but largely — a direct result of political decisions.