The Guardian, May 25, 2019: ‘It’s worse than murder’: how rural America became a hospital desert
Everybody called her Po. She was picking up sticks from the yard on July 7, 2014, five days shy of her 49th birthday, when she felt a sharp pain in her chest.
Six days earlier, their community hospital had closed. Pungo district hospital was 47 miles west of their house, in Belhaven, and had served the county since 1949, back when crab-picking plants and lumber mills kept these small waterfront communities working.
If you’re an accountant, hospitals are only as good as the number of paying patients. Belhaven’s population is about half what it was then. And Hyde county is now the fifth-sparsest county on the east coast, with nine people per square mile.
This spongy stretch of North Carolina’s inner banks represents the suffering side of a modern migration pattern in which southern cities are flourishing, but rural areas are shrinking and losing healthcare options. Since 2010, 53 rural hospitals have closed in 11 southern states, compared with 30 in the other 39 states. About half of those southern closures occurred in counties where non-whites make up a larger percentage of the population than they do the rest of the country. All but two happened in counties with poverty rates above the national average.
