hopsital closure

In my old town of Detroit. Sad.

clipped from news.yahoo.com Because roughly 90 percent of its 11,000 annual inpatients are covered under the Medicare or Medicaid public assistance programs, Riverview has struggled economically, said Bob Hoban, a senior vice president for St. John Health, Riverview's parent company. Experts say Riverview's decision to close fits a distressing, decades-long pattern of hospital closures in older cities across the nation. The trend has left large swaths of predominantly poor, black neighborhoods in cities such as St. Louis, Philadelphia and Cleveland underserved. Many say the loss of medical facilities for low-income patients is increasingly leaving overcrowded emergency rooms to double as primary-care centers.