Great Lengths for Great Medical Care

How far do you have to travel for medical care? 

Before this trip, I never thought twice about when and where I’d get medical care if I needed it (which thankfully, I rarely did). Growing up in suburban Milwaukee, I was less than ten minutes in one direction away from the closest hospital and ten minutes the opposite way from my pediatrician. In Chicago, I lived equidistant from two hospitals and fell asleep listening to sirens into the night. 

On the road, I discovered how lucky that truly was. 

Over and over again, I heard tales of the great lengths people have gone to see specialists, get emergency treatment, or even see a doctor period. A few weeks into the project last summer, I was driving down a two-lane road in northern Wisconsin when I stopped to talk with a woman named Lynn in Glidden. 

Glidden is a small town of just about 500 people nestled into the Northwoods, the relative middle of nowhere. Lynn was an older woman, grey hair peeking out from underneath her bandana, flour dusting her shirt — she runs the bakery. 

She moved up to Glidden decades earlier, seeking the safety small towns offer and a slower pace of life. Over the years, she’s watched the town struggle and suffer from the loss of manufacturing in the area: businesses have closed, people have moved away, and now she has to drive further than ever before for basic necessities, including groceries, clothes, and yes — healthcare. 

“To go to the doctor, go to Walmart, you have to go [about an hour away],” she said. “I only really go once or twice a year if I can help it.” 

In case of emergencies, Lynn told me, people have to travel more than an hour to the closest hospital. For serious cases, or to see specialists, they’re airlifted to hospitals even further away.

Lynn is not alone in her struggles with medical care access in the United States. Weeks later, when I was talking with an EMT in rural Ohio, he told me about the great distances they take patients. 

“We have an emergency room in the back of our ambulance,” Mark said, gesturing to the blue struck parked in the sun on a glimmering August day. 

With nearly an hour to the closest hospital, he said, they try to do all the care they can right here. All the EMTs are trained to stabilize patients and aid the most common ailments that cause calls: falls, strokes, heart attacks, and opioid overdoses. Once people are stable, they can continue on to the hospital — or in some of the most serious cases, they need to be airlifted to the next largest city, hours away by highway. 

For much of rural America, that reality seems common. 

There may be a doctor’s office or urgent care nearby, but — from stories I’ve heard on the road — they’re swamped with patients. I’m told of concerns about the quality of care, rising visit and procedure costs, and long wait times. To see a specialist, get higher quality care, or even (in some cases and parts of the country), earn access to the care they need period, patients need to drive — or be driven — more than an hour away. 

Following the events of January, I witnessed another complicating factor in obtaining medical care. Collin needed to see a doctor, that much was certain, but he needed to see one who would not only provide him high-quality care — he needed one who would provide high-quality and affirming care to someone who is transgender. That distinction meant that the hospital about an hour away was a no-go — so we drove more than three hours to the closest urban center so he could get the care he needed. 

In March, sitting around a kitchen table in Oklahoma, I learned that the matriarch of the family had gone even further than three hours — she’d flown to another continent. 

A few years ago, Helen needed to have a dermatological procedure done but it wasn’t going to be covered by insurance. Instead of paying thousands of dollars here in the states, she flew to Costa Rica for a few days — her first time out of the country. 

“I just needed to get it cut out,” she said, “and doctors make such a big deal of it. I knew another woman who did it, everybody does it, so it just made sense.” 

When asked if she saw a problem with that — having to fly to another country because she couldn’t afford the care she needed back home — she shrugged.

“It is what it is,” she said.

But does it have to be that way? I wondered at the time, and I still wonder now. Hearing and seeing the struggles of fellow Americans across the country, I wonder what would it take to ensure people had access to the quality medical care they needed. 

When a person must be driven more than an hour to the closest hospital, how does that harm their ability to heal — or even survive — their ailments? When they don’t have access to affordable care close by, does that mean that small ailments could grow into big (possibly even deadly) problems due to inattention? 

Solving medical care in this country has been puzzled over for generations, and likely will be debated for generations more. But seeing the effects firsthand — the people who have struggled from lack of access, the minutes that tick by from accident to medical care, the stress of not knowing if you’ll make it to the hospital “in time” — makes it clear: the system in place is not working. 

What will it take to find a solution that works for all — not some — once and for all?