Rep. Mark Green: Cut the red tape, let emergency rooms operate in rural areas

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Over the past decade, more than 100 rural hospitals across America have been forced to close their doors. It’s one of the greatest challenges facing our nation today. In my home state of Tennessee, we’ve seen 12 hospitals close, more than any other state in the United States, aside from Texas.

As an emergency room physician, an Army doctor, and the founder of a healthcare company in middle Tennessee, I’ve watched this crisis play out firsthand. Unchecked rules, regulations, and red tape coming out of Washington have encumbered health providers and threatened the lives and livelihoods of Americans who live in rural communities, maintaining a choke hold on access to medical care.

Rural hospitals have been left behind, and the impact has been devastating.

One of the most costly, outdated, and defunct examples of this I’ve seen is the burdensome “35-mile rule.”

This rule blatantly discriminates against Americans in rural areas by preventing hospitals less than 35 miles from any other hospital, no matter how far the travel time, from receiving the critical funding that comes with a “Critical Access Hospital” designation. Another 35-mile rule cripples the potential for freestanding emergency departments to operate in rural communities by only allowing them to exist within 35 miles of a sponsoring hospital.

This gross overregulation and red tape is not only arbitrary, it’s also deeply prejudicial, unfair, and unacceptable.

Last year, I introduced the bipartisan Rural Health Care Access Act with Democratic Rep. Bennie Thompson of Mississippi to do something about the first 35-mile rule and roll back the burdensome red tape preventing rural hospitals from getting the critical access funding they need. Now, I’m introducing a second bill, the Rural ER Access Act, to eliminate the second 35-mile rule on emergency rooms and permit them to operate in the rural communities that need them most.

Freestanding emergency departments provide rural communities where hospitals are not sustainable access to emergency care. They are often a vital part of rural economies, providing communities with the essential safety net of an emergency room, as well as jobs and basic infrastructure.

When a rural hospital closes due to a bureaucratic burden such as the 35-mile rule, the effects can be devastating — whether you’re a young mother in labor with an hour-long drive to the hospital, a son or daughter worried the ambulance just won’t get there in time for your elderly parent, or a worker whose family relies on your job at the hospital.

My Rural ER Access Act abolishes the requirement for freestanding ERs to operate within 35 miles of a hospital, lifting this unnecessary burden for health providers and making sure that rural communities at the very least can have an emergency room for the care they so desperately need.

Americans deserve better than the current bureaucratic overreach and red tape that concentrates healthcare in the most populated areas of the country. Americans deserve access to medical and emergency care regardless of where they live. Americans deserve a government that puts them first.

Now more than ever, we have to act to reverse the precipitous decline in health care access for so many Americans and ensure that those living outside cities are not left without access to emergency care. We have to tear down this web of regulations, rules, and restrictions that have had such a devastating effect on our country.

Rural hospitals have been facing a mounting crisis with few voices in Washington. It’s past time to remove the cumbersome rules that are causing our hospitals to close and then preventing freestanding emergency rooms when they do.

Now that President Trump has received a just and fair acquittal in the Senate, let’s get back to work. Let’s get bureaucrats out of the way and deliver real results for the American people. And let’s fight this overgrowth and overreach plaguing our government.

Rep. Mark Green, a Republican, represents Tennessee’s seventh congressional district in the U.S. House. He is also an emergency room physician.

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