Found out last Tuesday my state blocked a rural health report from the public

I stumbled across this buried report about hospital closures in our county from 2021. The state health department supposedly "withheld for review" but nobody ever saw it again. It listed 3 rural hospitals that were barely staying open. One of them shut down last March. Now families drive 45 miles for emergency care. What convinced me something shady was going on is I found a memo from a local rep asking the health department to release it and they never responded. Anyone else run into a state agency sitting on public health info like that?

3 comments

3 Comments

sean_park86d ago

Whoa hold up, I gotta push back on this a little. You're assuming there's some conspiracy when it's way more likely the state just dropped the ball or the report was full of stuff that would've caused a panic for no good reason. Rural hospitals close all the time because of money problems and low patient numbers, not because some guy in an office is hiding secrets. That rep asking for the report probably didn't get a reply because the health department is understaffed and buried in paperwork, not because they're covering up something shady. Maybe the report was preliminary and had bad data in it, so they held it back to fix it, and then it just got forgotten.

the_ruby6d ago

Three different state agencies have "lost" important documents in the past year alone, so it's not exactly a conspiracy theory to wonder if someone's just bad at their job. Telling people not to worry about a missing hospital closure report is like telling them not to worry about a strange noise in their car engine. Maybe the explanation is boring and bureaucratic, but it's still worth asking why the check engine light is on.

smith.jordan6d ago

Worked in a county health department for about twelve years, and Ive seen this exact scenario play out more than once. When a report gets held back, its almost always because someone up the chain was waiting on a second review from a specialist who was on leave, and then the person who knew about it moved to a different job. The paperwork just sits in a folder on a shared drive until somebody new stumbles across it six months later. If that rep really wants the info, they should call the department director directly, not just email the generic public inbox, because those are usually a black hole.