Phoebe Sumter Medical Center holds Rural Healthcare Summit

AMERICUS — Rural Georgia is facing a health care crisis, but unless you live in an impoverished areas of the state and have experienced a 30-minute drive just to see a medical care provider, most Georgians seem blissfully unaware of the dire situation facing small, poor towns.

And it’s not just Georgia. Rural residents across the nation generally lag far behind when it comes to health and quality of medical care.

A Rural Health Summit, attended by physicians, state legislators including Lt. Gov. Casey Cagle, hospital administrators and healthcare providers Tuesday at Phoebe Sumter Medical Center, discussed how to tackle the growing problem.

In the past five years, rural Georgia has seen five small town hospitals close, including two in southwest Georgia — Calhoun Memorial Hospital in Arlington and Stewart-Webster Hospital in Richland.

According to Georgia Health News CEO and Editor Andy Miller, rural regions have higher death rates due to heart disease, stroke and cancer. They also have higher rates or smoking, diabetes, and low birth-weight babies, and higher rates of uninsured people. And rural areas have chronic shortages of primary care physicians.

Some hospitals have kept their doors open, but have eliminated local labor and delivery units as cost-saving measures.

An estimated 2 million Georgians live in rural areas of the state. Dr. Karen Kinsell is well aware of the problems facing rural medicine. She is the sole physician at Clay County Medical Center in Fort Gaines.

“I see about 30 patients per day,” Kinsell said. “Most are from Clay County, but 30 to 40 percent are from out of county because they can’t go anywhere else. All our patients are Medicare, Medicaid or uninsured. Our financial situation is completely untenable — we are basically a charity.”

Ann Addison, CEO of Primary Care of Southwest Georgia in Blakely, said the situation is both a healthcare issue and an economic issue

“Right now rural health care systems are struggling for survival,” she said. “The closures of healthcare facilities not only deprive communities of access to medical care, it also deprives them economically. Somewhere between 15 to 20 percent of all jobs in rural communities — prepay and secondary — are related to healthcare.”

Now many rural health care providers are looking to the Georgia legislature for help — a fact not lost on Senate Health Service Committee Chair Renee Unterman of Buford.

“I am not from south Georgia, but I understand that there really are two Georgias,” Unterman said. “And south Georgia has a dearth of healthcare. But we also must face the reality of not every county in Georgia can have its own hospital. Senators Greg Kirk (R-Americus) and Dr. Dean Burke (R-Bainbridge) have been invaluable to us in providing information (to the Senate).”

Cagle said rural heathcare is evolving and there will be bumps along the way.

“We have a tremendous problem with rural healthcare in Georgia, and we as a state have challenges as well,” Cagle said. “We live in a changing world and we can’t do business as we have always done. Another reality is cost is a factor and healthcare is not cheap. This is an evolution, a journey we must embark on together.

“The question is how do we deliver healthcare in a diverse economy and make sure all of our communities have the right delivery mechanisms in place. We can’t do that with legacy-type thinking.”