Where There is No Doctor

When my wife and I enlisted in the Peace Corps and went overseas, our government sent us to a place where there was no medical clinic, no hospital. There were no health care facilities in the nearest village either, or in the next closest, or the one after that. We were given a medical survival manual and a first aid kit.

I followed the manual’s instructions to nurse boils from regular staph infections, treat malaria symptoms and weather periodic bouts of dysentery. For two years, I practiced medicine in a manner of speaking, knowing I was young and healthy and it would only be two years after all. Never did I imagine that even the largest communities in the area where I spent much of my childhood would be losing their hospitals three and a half decades later.

You might have heard that rural hospitals are closing all across the U.S., and they’re also closing in fair-size communities that aren’t exactly rural, places like Eau Claire and Chippewa Falls. This growing crisis brings Trump su…