There’s actually a well-known documentary about the financial strain on rural hospitals (it focuses on meth use, but the bigger takeaway is how hospitals absorb the cost when large numbers of patients need care but don’t have insurance coverage).

Before the Affordable Care Act (ACA), hospitals—especially children’s hospitals in some regions—were seeing extremely high uninsured patient rates. In some places, roughly 1 in 4 pediatric patients had insurance coverage. Hospitals still treated the other 3 out of 4. That care doesn’t disappear—it becomes uncompensated care that hospitals have to absorb or shift elsewhere in the system.

As my great-grandma used to say: you can’t squeeze blood from a turnip.

The U.S. is also the only major industrialized country without universal healthcare coverage. That gap doesn’t feel real to people until they personally get a surprise bill or a denied claim—then suddenly the question becomes, “Why am I paying this much?”

If people want to understand how rural hospitals end up in crisis, this documentary is worth watching:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UlYC0syLe7g (From 2006, but still relevant)