An initiative to promote the financial health of rural hospitals around the state has expanded, according to an announcement last week.

Eight hospitals — including nearby Kittanning’s ACMH Hospital — joined the Pennsylvania Rural Health Model, which announced its first five participants earlier this year, while Aetna joined Highmark, UMPC and four other insurance providers as private insurance payers for the model.

Gov. Tom Wolf recently signed Senate Bill 314, which established the Rural Health Redesign Center Authority and the state’s Rural Health Redesign Center Fund.

This is an important effort.

A study by the North Carolina Rural Health Research Program — which undertakes research and analysis on rural health care delivery across the United States — found that 142 rural hospitals have closed around the nation during the past decade.

In 2019 alone, 19 rural hospitals shut their doors. A majority of the health care sites were forced to close due to financial problems, and the study found that 38 percent of rural U.S. hospitals are unprofitable.

Wolf said that nearly half of Pennsylvania’s rural hospitals operate at negative margins and risk being closed.

You can imagine the effect of such closures.

The North Carolina Rural Health Research Program study noted that 43 percent of the closed hospitals were more than 15 miles to the nearest hospital, while an additional 15 percent were more than 20 miles.

Although 2019 was considered to have a booming national economy, the year was discovered in the study to be the worst for hospital closures in 14 years.

An obvious negative impact of rural hospitals closing their doors is the inconvenience for those who use them and are, therefore, forced to travel farther for care. A matter of minutes added to the transportation of a patient can be life threatening.

But the shuttering of such facilities can also cause significant harm to local economies because those located in rural areas can often be among a region’s largest employers. The closure of a rural hospital can lead to devastating losses in the amount of jobs in a small town.

We hope the Pennsylvania Rural Health Model will continue to expand, and add more hospitals that serve Butler County residents.

Ensuring that rural hospitals keep their doors open benefits both the health and wallets of residents within their vicinity.

— NCD