Yet, even as this town deals with the trauma of losing a beloved institution, deeper national questions underlie the struggle: Do small communities like Fort Scott need a traditional hospital at all? And if not, how will they get the health care they need?
Sisters of Mercy nuns opened Fort Scott’s 10-bed frontier hospital in 1886 — a time when traveling 30 miles to see a doctor was unfathomable and when most medical treatments were so primitive they could be dispensed almost anywhere.
Now, driving the four-lane highway north to Kansas City, Kan., or crossing the state line to Joplin, Mo., and back is a day trip that includes shopping and a stop at a favorite restaurant. The bigger hospitals there offer the latest sophisticated treatments and equipment.
And when patients here get sick, many simply go elsewhere. An average of nine patients a day stayed in Mercy Hospital Fort Scott’s more than 40 beds from July 2017 through June 2018. And these low occupancy numbers are common: Forty-five Kansas hospitals report an average daily census of fewer than two patients. But Fort Scott is a place that needs health care: One in 4 children in Bourbon County lives in poverty. People die much younger here than the rest of the state and rates for teen births, adult smoking, unemployment and violent crime are all higher in Bourbon County than the state average, according to data collected by the Kansas Health Institute and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
Ten percent of Bourbon County’s more than 14,000 residents, about half of whom live in Fort Scott, lack health insurance. Kansas is one of 14 states that have not expanded Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act and, while many factors contribute to rural hospital closures, the GAO report found states that had expanded Medicaid had fewer of them.
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