Bringing Health Care to Appalachia: The Long-Run Impact of a Rural Health Care System

Theodore Figinski and Erin Troland

Economic Development Quarterly, 2022, vol. 36, issue 3, 261-275

Abstract: The U.S. government has supported rural hospitals through direct subsidies and staff recruitment programs. However, little is known about the long-run impact of large-scale changes to rural health care. The authors explore the long-run trajectory of Appalachian counties where a coal mining union introduced a pioneering rural health care program in the 1950s, anchored by a chain of high-quality hospitals. Hospital beds per capita in counties where the union built its hospitals are persistently high through 2006, even when compared to similar counties and accounting for a variety of supply- and demand-side factors. In particular, union counties defied a national hospital consolidation trend starting in the 1980s. Results are consistent with a supply-side explanation where the scale and/or innovation of the union's investment allowed hospital markets to thrive and attract patients from a broad geography.

Keywords: rural health care; rural hospitals; Appalachian regional health care; miners memorial hospitals; Hill-Burton Act (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/08912424211056685 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:ecdequ:v:36:y:2022:i:3:p:261-275

DOI: 10.1177/08912424211056685

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Economic Development Quarterly
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().