Matriot - Rural Closedown Rural hospitals are closing their doors. Five hundred counties in the U.S. have no hospital at all. In rural areas, access is the issue.
Many communities lack a primary practitioner, a clinic, a drugstore, or an ambulance.
Rural Closedown Jeff Norman, a botanist, lives on a mountaintop in a rural area that stretches along 60 miles of coastline and extends inland into 1200 acres of wilderness. One day, while working on his house, he accidentally cut open an artery. The local Health Center, an hour's hike down the mountain, then a twenty minute drive away, is open 14 hours a week. The nearest hospital is an additional hour's drive from the Center. He was up on the roof when it happened, working the cap back onto the stovepipe, the chill, this late summer, familiar as breathing.