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My Point of View by Jennifer Vogt-Erickson

As a person who grew up in the sticks of northern Minnesota, I never imagined that people living in a city of 18,500 people would find themselves in the situation of not knowing where they might get a hospital bed if they needed one.

Will a patient here have to travel 30 minutes? An hour? An hour and a half? How will their family get to see them and make sure they are receiving good care? How will they transport their loved ones back home again?

This is the fix we are in, and it has been a burden for many families. We are experiencing this more frequently than people in any other rural area of Minnesota.

As you’re probably aware, Mayo consolidated Albert Lea’s hospital beds to Austin starting in 2017, but that doesn’t mean our patients will get a bed in Austin. I have talked with patients (or their spouses) who have also ended up in Cannon Falls, Mankato and Fairmont.

My 80-year-old mother needed a bed four weeks ago, and I wondered how far we would have to go to see her. The bad news is that we were told there were no beds available anywhere in the Mayo system. The good news is she spent a full day and night being observed in Albert Lea’s ER, so she got local care. The bad news is she got pushed out on the street at 5:45 a.m. when the ER needed her bed for another patient. (My sister and I assisted her in getting home.)

I’m angry about this degradation of services, but the thing that takes the cake is that Mayo is not hurting for money, unlike many other hospital systems in Minnesota. It reported $1.3 billion in income so far this year, and a 6.8% operating margin. This should evoke tough questions about why Mayo is an outlier, and this is part of the answer — it is making money on our rural seniors’ backs by not providing needed hospital care close to home, which they absolutely deserve to get.

The southeast region of Minnesota, where Mayo has a hospital monopoly, has consistently had fewer open beds available than other regions of Minnesota outside the Metro this year. We appreciate the care Rochester provides for complex cases, but Mayo’s flush margins are coming at a cost to rural healthcare that is unjust. Real people are suffering.

We have to stand up for ourselves and demand our representatives and senators at every level find a way to stop Mayo from continuing to shuffle seniors around like they are interchangeable parts instead of real people.

Health care is not compatible with a “just-in-time” manufacturing mindset, and running it lean is running it mean. Our seniors who are already stressed from illness are experiencing additional, needless stress because Mayo is treating them like second-class citizens.

What is it like to not be treated as a second-class citizen? My 86-year-old neighbor had an attack of severe abdominal pain earlier this month when she was visiting her son in Detroit Lakes and had to be rushed to the ER. Detroit Lakes is only about half the size of Albert Lea. Not only did she get a hospital bed right there, but she had inpatient surgery to remove her gallbladder right there. She felt like she received exceptional care from a Sanford doctor at an Essential hospital in a town of 9,800.

Now consider that at the beginning of this year, her husband needed hospital care, and the closest bed he could get was in Fairmont. That is an hour west of Albert Lea, and she no longer drives outside of town. Fortunately she has family who could take turns driving her to Fairmont to visit her husband.

Mayo hasn’t kept its promises about us being able to get care at its “Austin campus” of our hospital. It seems to be trying to condition our rural seniors to think they can’t expect a hospital bed near their home, and they need to take whatever they can get.

Mayo has not been honest about what kind of health care services are possible for us. Maybe they’re not feasible with Mayo’s set of priorities, but other Minnesota hospital systems are managing to provide the kind of care that we aren’t getting from Mayo. Our seniors deserve better, and we have to keep demanding that they get it. We need real remedies, and real legislative interventions that will bring local hospital care back to our seniors.

Jennifer Vogt-Erickson is a member of the Freeborn County DFL Party.