By BECKY KISER
Hays Post

Rural healthcare is important to Kansas, believes U.S. Senator Jerry Moran, R-KS, especially in the sparsely populated western region.

“If you lose your healthcare delivery system, and don’t have a hospital and doctor nearby, you lose your community,” he said during a town hall meeting Saturday morning at the Hays Med Center for Health Improvement.

Moran used his own 98-year-old father, who lives in Plainville, as a personal example:

Moran explained Medicare reimbursements were reduced two percent during sequestration.

Now, President Obama is proposing a one percent cut in compensation to critical-access hospitals and also wants to increase the distance facilities must have between them in order to qualify for federal assistance.

Moran used the north-central Kansas town of Belleville as an example in which that town’s hospital and four more near it would all be forced to close within this scenario.

“To retroactively tell hospitals that they know longer qualify for critical access reimbursement means you put them out of business,” said Moran.

There are 137 hospitals in Kansas.