“We have not seen the benefits of what we were told.”

Healthcare and the state of rural hospitals were a focus of conversation at the Geary County Farm Bureau luncheon.

County Commissioner Keith Ascher said he is concerned about the future of Geary Community Hospital.

“All hospitals are struggling, and now being a County Commissioner, I’m concerned about our hospital because it’s not easy to make a go of it – there’s so many factors involved; there’s Medicare/Medicaid, getting payments, having to actually supply care to people that can’t afford it – we can’t just turn people away,” said Ascher.

Ascher said that people need to understand that the bond issue for the hospital was passed under the pretense that a population boom from Fort Riley was imminent.

“We’re not getting everything we were told, I’m not saying we were sold a bill of goods, but we just have not seen the benefits of what we were told originally – and that dates back way before me – so that’s just my biggest concern, what do we do/how are we supposed to make up for this,” said Ascher.

Ascher added that the new IACH facility and the many VA clinics in the area pull people away from Geary Community Hospital.

“It’s counterintuitive to what we were told, and it’s troublesome to me,” said Ascher.

With the repeal and eventual replacement of the Affordable Care Act on the horizon, Congressman Roger Marshall noted that the outlook for Kansas’ hospitals will be much brighter.

“One thing that people aren’t talking much about is that when the Affordable Care Act was instituted, they decreased Medicare reimbursement to fund Obama’s Medicaid expansion; most of our rural hospitals are full of Medicare patients, so when [he] decreased that reimbursement to rural hospitals, it was disproportionately hurting us,” said Marshall. “This country spent $60 billion last year on Medicaid expansion, many of those people were able bodied people, so I would like to take some of those monies back to help rural hospitals stay afloat.”