A recent WyoFile article highlights the plight of Baggs residents after the only medical provider in town closed shop. We feel for the community and for all the other small towns grappling with the changing landscape of living healthy lives in rural Wyoming.
Opinion
There is no doubt that providing health care is complicated — especially in small rural towns far from anything resembling an urban center. Reporter Madelyn Beck did a great job covering the layers of issues communities must contend with.
We need to focus on improving health care access for the citizens who live in these communities. People in Baggs now have to rely on the town’s volunteer emergency service as a source of primary care, and we pray that nothing too serious happens to them or their children who can’t survive a 40-minute drive — one that is icy or even flooded during certain times of the year.
Recruiting medical professionals is challenging across Wyoming, as even some of our larger communities lack providers for essential types of health care, like obstetrics. There is no silver bullet when it comes to fixing health care in Wyoming. However, there are systemic issues that state lawmakers can address. Like all businesses, health care clinics cannot operate indefinitely at a financial loss. When so many people lack health insurance, health care becomes more expensive and unaffordable for everyone.
About 19,000 Wyomingites are currently stuck in the “coverage gap.” These are people who don’t have jobs that offer health insurance or do not qualify to get Medicaid and don’t make enough to get help paying for insurance. Wyoming legislators can and should close this coverage gap, especially when the federal government will pay 90% of the costs.
Over the next five years, closing the coverage gap by expanding Medicaid could create 2,000 jobs and grow economic output by $1.5 billion here. A thriving Wyoming will be more attractive to recruiting and retaining providers to live and work in our great state.
Montana closed its coverage gap in 2015, and it has been a lifeline in rural parts of that state. When people obtained insurance and health care providers got reimbursed for services rather than taking a loss, many providers expanded services. Some medical providers in very rural parts of the state have doubled the size of their health care facilities and workforce.
Closing the coverage gap is not a silver bullet and will not bring back everything that Wyoming has lost, but it is a critical piece of the puzzle to stabilize our health care system and start rebuilding. We hope that in 2025, legislators will finally take action to make affordable, quality health care accessible to Wyoming families. Please join us in telling legislators and candidates it is time to close the coverage gap.
Signed by the Healthy Wyoming Board of Directors: Richard Garrett, Pat Sweeny, Jan Cartwright, Brandon Rosty.
Healthy Wyoming is a nonprofit organization working with a broad coalition committed to finding solutions to improving healthcare in Wyoming. Learn more at healthywyoming.org.
These are elected officials. They both embody and express the will of Wyoming’s citizens. Apparently the majority of citizens want to cull the herd, to rid the population of the old, the sick and infirm. That these are relatives, neighbors and friends doesn’t seem to make a difference.
Wyoming’s distaste for medicaid is a kind of genocide at the margins, the social edges where we don’t notice people getting sick and dying because they are poor and have no voice that anyone listens to. There is no compassion when the political world promotes “survival of the fittest.”
Bad news about Medicaid and Medicare. I made myself read Project 2025 (900 pages of policy talk that Trump endorses). The proposed changes to Medicaid and Medicare frame the programs as responsible for US budget deficit ( I do not agree). Here is the exact words — “In essence, our deficit problem is a Medicare and Medicaid problem.” Project 2025 proposes broad health care reform “Market based” and “empower individuals to control their health care-related dollars and decisions.” Not sure what that means, but I have read the new administration WILL reduce both Medicare and Medicaid.
Medicaid-expansion has been proven to improve healthcare statewide, especially in rural-states like Wyoming. The people who benefit most are senior-citizens whose incomes are just above the poverty-line. Medicaid-expansion expands Medicaid-coverage to not just those who live in actual poverty, but also to those whose incomes are between 101% of the poverty-mark and 150% of that mark, at federal-expense. Suddenly seniors in that bracket save hundreds of dollars per month in Medicare-premiums, and also get $1000 per year, toward dental-bills. 40-states have adopted Medicaid-expansion. Since Medicaid pays for more services than poor-people can afford out-of-pocket, this extra-business and the certainty of getting paid, helps marginally-profitable business, like rural clinics and cancer-centers, stay open. But our legislature does not even debate the issue of Medicaid-expansion.
Of the 40-states that have adopted Medicaid-expansion, seven of those states had to do so by citizen-initiative, when their Republican-legislatures refused to enact the will of the people. All over the country, citizens of other states will be voting on ballot-proposals, where citizens signed petitions to get an issue onto the ballot for a vote. That is called Direct-Democracy. Citizens of seven red-states had to get Medicaid-expansion by Direct-Democracy. This is because Republicans, in Wyoming and elsewhere, oppose Medicaid-expansion, because it is part of Obamacare, and Republicans do not want voters to realize the benefits created by Democrats.
But we can’t have a vote on Medicaid-expansion here. Because of extreme restrictions on citizen-initiative petition-drives, no citizen-initiative has made it onto the ballot in Wyoming since 1996. Furthermore, since 1996, our Republican state-congress has tightened the restrictions three times, to make it even more-difficult to get a citizen-initiative onto our ballot. This is the opposite of democracy.
Thank you Gina for succinctly capturing my thoughts on the positives of Medicaid Expansion, and thanks to Healthy Wyoming for continuing “the good fight”.
We may not make any progress during this Administration, but let’s keep up the efforts and look to the future .
Chuck Harris – Physician Assistant
Healthy Wyoming – I appreciate your philanthropy; your work gives some hope in darker times. The other option, however, is to give WY what we just overwhelmingly asked for, which is far less government, neutered and defunded institutions, less spending, anti-science, anti-healthcare, anti-education, anti-environment and anti-rule of law. Let’s come together finally and give WY the government and healthcare we so deserve. Do not shrink the healthcare deserts of WY, expand them at a rapid rate. Become the Mojave of healthcare, the Red Desert of OB/GYNs. Bring the lack of care we voted for to all WY communities (except Teton county, of course). Let’s own the Libs, but do it with style this time. No more half-stepping. Grab some popcorn, join Steve Bannon and the trump faithful as we burn it all down.
You got that right – Trump WILL burn it all down.
Hey, it’s not for a cow, so Hicks doesn’t really care.
All the money we have wasted on endless wars since 1950 would have fueled free health care and free college/trade school tuition with money to spare.