After the financial collapse of Madera County's only general hospital, residents are left with slim options for care. Some have come to accept that they may die in an emergency.
It was dinnertime when Sabrina Baker, a mother of six, felt the familiar twinge of contractions.
“I mean, I’m lucky,” Baker said, standing outside her home in a swath of Madera County surrounded by cropland and almond groves. “We could have died.” In California, nine rural hospitals have been shuttered since 2005, and 17 are at risk of closing. Kaweah Health Medical Center in Visalia, about an hour’s drive from Madera and the largest hospital in rural Tulare County, is among those bowing under serious financial problems.
For Madera Community Hospital, already operating on thin margins, rising costs for medical equipment and the spike in salaries for traveling nurses who were in high demand during the pandemic proved too much to absorb. Inside, a haunting silence hung in the darkened hallways as hospital CEO Karen Paolinelli surveyed the place where she started her career four decades ago. She sighed as she pointed out the CT scanner the hospital had just purchased to replace a 15-year-old machine that was always breaking. The new one wasn’t even plugged in when the hospital closed.
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