{"id":21174,"date":"2026-07-11T10:14:02","date_gmt":"2026-07-11T18:14:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/coldstreams.com\/social\/?p=21174"},"modified":"2026-07-12T10:19:34","modified_gmt":"2026-07-12T18:19:34","slug":"much-of-todays-news-are-just-blog-posts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/coldstreams.com\/social\/2026\/07\/11\/much-of-todays-news-are-just-blog-posts\/","title":{"rendered":"Much of today’s “news” is just blog posts"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

This “news” story is literally a personal blog post: The tug of living in the beautiful rural America West is increasingly tempered by a growing lack of healthcare | Comment | inlander.com<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

She <\/a>raises health care access issues in rural areas with a story about her mother but does so by going back 30 years:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n

My own mother had heart surgery in Cleveland because there was no cardiac surgeon in Casper in the late \u201990s.<\/strong> After her surgery, she was in the hospital for six weeks. It was a lonely time, far from our community. I know of snowbirds who go to Arizona or one of the coasts for their medical care. When I was a kid, you were seen as fancy if you went to Denver to do your back-to-school shopping. Now it is medical care that the people I know go to cities for.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

We know from her column her Mom still lives in the Casper area:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Their home [today] is gorgeous. It\u2019s in the foothills with an uninterrupted view of Casper Mountain. ….<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

But Casper, Wyoming, today is not the rural health care vacuum it once was. Bringing up a past that is no longer true is not a good way to make an argument!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Banner Health in Casper, WY is the state’s only Level 2 Trauma Center, has a 2-bay Cath Lab with 24×7 on call interventional cardiologists, and a whole spectrum of medical specialists, and air medevac services. Her Mom has access to high quality care.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rural health care is an issue but an expectation you can have access to big city specialists anywhere you live does not make sense either – a moment’s thought should identify a few reasons why!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A year ago I sat on an airline flight next to an 80 year old who lives on her son’s ranch in Wyoming. (Her son is prominent so I will not mention specifics.) She mentioned it’s an hour into town for local health care and for specialized services she heads to Salt Lake City, getting rides from her adult kids. An emergency means a helicopter or fixed wing medevac flight.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I live in the eastern half of Oregon. A few days ago I watched on Flight Radar as a helicopter transported a patient on a one hour flight from a small town in the barren eastern half of the state to a hospital near Boise, Idaho. In choosing where we live (and might yet live in a different place in the future), access to health care was on our list. There is no way our society can afford to have local access to infrequently used specialty care everywhere in the country.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Also in eastern Oregon, much was made of a community hospital closing its maternity services. The reality was that local births had fallen to an average of 1 birth per week -yet had to keep a mostly empty facility with staff on hand or on call, and trained in maternity care – which was expensive to do – to serve a dwindling number of births. Residents now need to go to a hospital about 45 minutes away, which still handles several births each week.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The author of above linked story was born in Singapore to an Irish immigrant father to the U.S. and a US native American mother. The author is a citizen of Ireland (which means a citizen of the EU) and the U.S., and teaches creative writing in Colorado. She grew up in Casper and should know better than to write something like the above as a published opinion column in news outlets. She is a bit of elitist.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Author cites a situation 30 years ago about lack of health care in Casper WY – a city that today has Wyoming’s only Level 2 Trauma Center and a full suite of specialists. Citing something from 30 years ago that is no longer true is not a good way to make a logical argument for rural health care issues.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,9,348],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-21174","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-assertion","category-cherry-picking","category-public-health"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/coldstreams.com\/social\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21174","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/coldstreams.com\/social\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/coldstreams.com\/social\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/coldstreams.com\/social\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/coldstreams.com\/social\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21174"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/coldstreams.com\/social\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21174\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21207,"href":"https:\/\/coldstreams.com\/social\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21174\/revisions\/21207"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/coldstreams.com\/social\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21174"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/coldstreams.com\/social\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21174"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/coldstreams.com\/social\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21174"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}