A Rural Hospital’s Excruciating Choice: $3.2 Million a Year or Inpatient Care?

patients travel up to eight hours round trip from homes without addresses. “About 12 miles past Yellow Pine,” one said; “middle fork of the Salmon River — can’t get there by road,” another described.

If they're driving eight hours to fucking Cascade Idaho they're choosing NOT to drive to Richmond, Missoula, Coer d'Alene, Walla Walla, Spokane, BOISE... I mean, I get it that no one at the New York Times has ever been to mutherfucking Idaho but PORTLAND is 8 hours from Cascade. SALT LAKE CITY is six and a half.

Here, where deer graze on a helipad and nurses ventilate patients by hand, resourcefulness has long been the drumbeat of the operation.

You have a fucking helicopter? Shut the fuck up then, your fucking Tier 1 is Harborview.

EIGHT FUCKING BEDS. You have. Eight. Fucking beds. Trust me - as someone who grew up with "rural medical centers" that diagnosed my fingernail eczema as "possibly leprosy" and were so goddamn flabbergasted that they made me sit as an exhibit at a regional medical conference? Fuck Cascade Idaho. "The government is oppressing us by giving us four hundred fucking thousand dollars per year per bed we're giving up" like anyone goes inpatient in a town without a fucking McDonald's cry me a fucking river.

If you want medicine to be affordable? You have to accept some socialism. That socialism means a 2-hour cabulance ride to A BETTER FUCKING HOSPITAL most of the time. I hate to break it to the New York Times but this is a way of fucking life for everyone who lives more than an hour from an airport.

Jesus fucking christ. "Excruciating choice." Eat a dick, NYT.