Democrats Need Rural Voters. Can They Win Them Over By Fixing Rural Healthcare?

Javius Lamar Mitchell was a typical 11-year-old kid: he loved watching the Walking Dead on Netflix, playing Madden NFL 2019 on his PlayStation 4, and going to after-school football practice in his small, rural town of Hughes Springs, Texas. But there was one key difference between Mitchell and his tween compatriots in cities and suburban areas around the country: how far he lived from a hospital. While the average distance to an emergency room is 5.6 miles in suburban areas, and 4.4 miles in urban ones, according to a 2018 report by Pew Research Center, the closest hospital to Mitchell’s house was 24 miles away. That difference may have been fatal. On Aug. 9, when Mitchell suffered a severe asthma attack, it took emergency services 45 minutes to get him to a hospital. Despite paramedics’ best efforts, his asthma attack narrowed his airway so much that the supplemental oxygen they provided him couldn’t get to his brain. A week later, his mother NaTasha Holloman had to make the devastating decision to withdraw life-sustaining care from her son, whom she described to TIME as “sweet, smart and understanding.” “The town let us down. The town let him down,” said Barbara Brown, Mitchell’s aunt who has been lobbying local leaders to open a community clinic in the days since her nephew’s death. The circumstances that likely contributed to Mitchell’s death are becoming more common. As hospitals consolidate and close and medic...
Source: TIME: Health - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Uncategorized 2020 Healthcare rural America Source Type: news