MANKATO — Sen. Rich Draheim has a concern. The subject? Mayo Clinic closing six clinics across Minnesota by the end of the year. The problem? How few people seem to have noticed.
“(Most people) are probably not going to realize this has happened. … they probably won’t know until they go to make an appointment,” Draheim said.
It’s a phenomenon one of his colleagues, Sen. Nick Frentz, has seen as well.
“I don’t know that I’ve seen that many emails about it,” Frentz said.
Frentz is a Senate representative for two of the cities, North Mankato and St. Peter, that will see clinics closing by the end of the year. Draheim’s district includes Belle Plaine and Montgomery, both of which will have clinics closing. He says this is just the latest in a trend for the state.
“It’s been a trend for years. In rural Minnesota, the access to health care is dwindling. … There’s obviously consolidation going on across the state, and we see bigger companies taking over smaller companies, and then they slowly cut services or make it only available a day or two, then they say, ‘We don’t have enough people to come in,’” Draheim said.
The other cities with clinics closing are Wells and Caledonia. As a part of the move, some procedures will also be moved from Albert Lea to Austin or Waseca.
Mayo in a release said this move was being done as a, “result of the challenges of providing health care in rural Minnesota — such as staffing shortages and a decline in the number of patients.”
Frentz said he’s had conversations with representatives from Mayo within the last few days, in which they shared their side of things.
“These changes that come about when health care organizations choose to decrease services, those are the kind of things that get discussed. … The pitch is that it is more cost effective, though it is less convenient for patients,” Frentz said.
The closings, scheduled to take place by the start of December, won’t just impact a community’s access to health care. As Frentz points out, they can impact the economic outlook of the communities as well.
“I think it’s fair to ask ‘How do you expect people in small communities to feel when health care moves to a larger city?’ It raises questions for the future, and their ability to attract residents,” Frentz said.
Legislative changes still needed
As access to local health care becomes more and more challenging in rural areas, Draheim is wondering what more the state could have done to prevent these closings; and what more they’ll have to do next year.
“This is a higher priority than some of the non-essential stuff we funded as a state. … We’re putting more time into cannabis than we are into first responders, hospitals and clinics,” Draheim said. “A first responder, to me, is public safety; and that is supposed to be one of our top priorities as a state.”
Draheim said that, with a special session on gun violence looming, it’s too early to know how high up the priority list this will be come the next regular session. However, both he and Frentz agree it should be near the top.
“We spend a lot of time trying to help small communities in rural Minnesota. When a facility makes a change like this, that decreases availability, and it hurts those communities,” Frentz said. “We have to be fighting for all communities, or we do it for no communities. We have great small communities that provide health care or economic development, and the state has to be a willing supporter in that.”
Questions over new addition
While the concerns from residents may be fewer than he’d like, Draheim says the ones he has heard center around one question: What’s going on with the new Mankato campus addition?
“I have had probably someone every month in the last year tell me they wait and wait to get seen at Mankato. For all the money that was invested on that addition, what good is it if you can’t staff it or you won’t have a room available for somebody,” Draheim said.
The $155 million expansion opened at the Mayo Mankato campus last year, and boasts 121 beds in a three-story tower.
“Here we have this newly remodeled, newly added on to the hospital, and you have to wait a day to get a bed. That is unacceptable. We’ve got to start rethinking how we do care,” Draheim said.
When it comes to how to reshape care, the answers aren’t clear, but Draheim offered a few examples of how to address problems he’s seeing not at Mayo specifically, but across the health-care industry.
“I think we need to really look at how we classify nonprofits,” Draheim said. “This isn’t directed at Mayo specifically, but some other health-care companies in the state pay their executives millions of dollars and they’re classified as a nonprofit. To me, that’s not what my belief in nonprofit is supposed to be, or what it was intended to be.”