Boulder Foothills Hospital: No more babies. [View all]

http://www.dailycamera.com/boulder-business/ci_31232021/boulder-medical-center-patients-will-need-have-babies

Background: Boulder has one hospital, Boulder Medical Center (Boulder Community Health Foothills Hospital), and Boulder Community Health owns around 80-90% of the local medical practices, imaging, physical therapy services and specialist services. Louisville has a Seventh Day Adventist Hospital, Lafayette has a Little Sisters of No Mercy for You Catholic Exempla hospital, and Longmont has Longmont United Hospital (which is now owned by BCH).

BMC will no longer do deliveries at all. People having babies can either a) switch doctors and practices to a birthing center (that has a tendency to push so.much.woo) or drive 15 miles to Longmont, or switch doctors and practices and drive 10 miles to Louisville, or 14 miles to Exempla fuck you if you think we care about the mother's life or have any respect for non-binary persons.

They're blaming this on "an aging population." Boulder is a UNIVERSITY town with 40K undergraduates and a 10,000 person grad student population. People start having babies in their very late 20s and 30s. Boulder is extremely expensive, even for Front Range Colorado, but Boulder's birth rate is in line with every other metro in the region.

This isn't about limited demand -- it's about the near-monopoly consolidation BCH has managed to exert on this community. Communities without OB services tend to lose the ability to perform those services in an emergency situation, and tend to have worse outcomes.

This is an example of the damage of provider consolidation, which is a side effect of the insurance industry's meddling in health care. It's not just the rural hospitals that suffer without insurance coverage and guaranteed payment for service, but they're the canary in the coal mine. If it can happen in Boulder -- which is in the top 10% of wealthiest counties in the country, with almost 100% insured -- it can happen anywhere. This is why we need single payer and to nationalize providers.