“Imagine yourself being at a lake in Minnesota, and your kid has a sore throat. Well, you can dial up and take a look through a telehealth [visit],” Miner said. “And we will see you Monday through Friday, 8 to 5. You would be surprised how that is starting to catch on.”
More is at stake than medical access. The hospital became Appleton’s largest employer after a prison closed in 2010, and its middle- and upper-income jobs are irreplaceable to the largely agricultural local economy.
Being small isn’t necessarily the problem. Hospitals with 25 or fewer beds qualify for federal critical-access designations and payments from the Medicare program for senior citizens. Those help them come closer to covering their costs.
Sanford Health’s 14-bed hospital in Jackson, Minn., routinely posts operating gains of 20% or higher. It has the critical-access designation and doesn’t have to subsidize money-losing operations such as nursing homes tethered to other hospitals, said Eric Hilmoe, chief operating officer for Sanford’s southwest Minnesota region. Just to the west, though, Sanford’s 48-bed hospital in Worthington is distressed while maintaining a full range of hospital services for a wide geographic area without critical-access support.
Federal cuts threaten even metro hospitals, especially the trauma centers at North Memorial in Robbinsdale and Hennepin Healthcare in Minneapolis, Morrison said during Tuesday’s forum. Hennepin is already financially distressed.
Fifteen of the 20 hospitals that posted the largest operating losses in Minnesota in 2023 were independent. Gildemeister said hospitals affiliated with larger systems benefit from efficiencies, such as cheaper electronic recordkeeping and bulk pharmacy orders.
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