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STAT+: Congress created a unique plan to save rural hospitals — but few are using it
'A stopgap to the hospital closure crisis' has been used by only 38 facilities because of the strings attached.
When Ted Matthews came out of retirement in early 2023 to retake the helm of the rural Texas hospital where he’d started his health care career, it was something of a rescue mission. They were having bake sales to keep the place afloat. Staff were updating their resumes. At every board meeting, they’d decide which bills to pay.
“It was the consensus that we were going to be that twenty-seventh rural hospital in Texas to close,” said Matthews, interim CEO of Anson General Hospital in Anson, a West-Central Texas town of roughly 2,300 people. “There was just no question about that.”
In a last-ditch effort to turn its fortunes around, Anson General applied to be a Rural Emergency Hospital, a new type of hospital Congress created in 2023 to keep rural hospitals afloat. The government pays these hospitals a fixed sum each month — over $3 million annually — instead of reimbursing them for the inpatient services they provide. Medicare also adds 5% to their payments for outpatient services. For Anson General, those monthly checks of roughly $270,000 have brought it back from the brink.
And yet, just 38 hospitals have taken up the new designation since 2023, fewer than researchers had predicted. Many of them are hospitals like Anson General, whose leaders felt they had no other choice.
