Healthy healthcare system key to W.Va’s future

BECKLEY - The way Debrin Jenkins sees it, West Virginia is in the eye of what she describes as a health care tsunami.

Congress is flirting with repealing the Affordable Care Act, with or without replacing it; West Virginia has an inordinately high percentage of 8- to 10-year-old kids showing signs of pre-diabetes; and baby boomer health care professionals retiring a lot faster than they are being replaced.

Jenkins, executive director of the West Virginia Rural Health Association, said any one of those could be devastating. Collectively, she figures they have the potential to derail West Virginia's future if they're not addressed.

"We're facing a tsunami if those 184,0000 (who got insurance through ACA) lose it," she said. "We're facing a tsunami if all those kids (showing early signs of diabetes) get it. And we're already facing the problem of how we're going to replace" retiring health care professionals.

"One of the things we've found that's bad is the median age of physicians - both allopathic and osteopathic - as well as our nurses is 50 years old, and they're retiring. We do not have enough students in the pipeline to take care of that."

Jenkins said WVRHC is all about the details - figuring out how to get information into the hands of people who need it or who can use it, analyzing healthcare trends and how they could impact the future.

When they started analyzing the data, she said one thing that stood out is how so many children in West Virginia are being raised by grandparents who themselves are living in poverty Families living in poverty don't always have access to fresh, healthy foods, she said.

"That's a bad thing. It would bankrupt the state 15 or 20 years from now when we start having (young people) losing limbs, showing signs of glaucoma in their 20s and 30s," she said, pointing out those with limited financial resources tend to eat a lot of carbohydrates. "The gandparents are scraping by, not getting a lot of assistance (and the kids are) developing diabetes because they're not getting any fresh foods and they're not getting a lot of physical activity."

West Virginia also has an aging population. "As people age, they're going to need more and more services," she said. "And we have one of the sickest populations, because of all those things we've talked about and, historically, because we've done dangerous jobs ... mining, logging, fracking ... those kinds of jobs all take a toll on the health of employees. Also, per capita, we have the largest veteran population . a lot of older people joined the service because it was the only way they could go to school on the GI bill."

Then there's the potential repeal of the ACA: She said 184,000 West Virginians were able to get insurance through the Obama administration's health care plan.

"Right now in West Virginia, our concern is what's going to happen to those 184,000 people if repeal goes into effect and there's no replacement for those individuals to access health care," Jenkins said. "We're also concerned that CHIP (Childrens Health Insurance Program) won't be funded, There'd be 24,000 kids that wouldn't have coverage if Congress doesn't fund it."

She said West Virginia needs to make it a priority to attract students to pursue careers in the healthcare arena and to keep them here once they graduate.

"The overall thing people don't realize about rural health care . West Virginia is all rural," she said. "Our largest city doesn't even have 55,000 people. West Virginia is all rural. We will never improve our economic standing if we don't have the medical infrastructure available because companies do not come in and spend money they don't put companies in areas where there is not good health care infrastructure and they don't come to places where they don't have healthy workforces because it costs too much money Our mission is also to help people understand that to have a good economy we have to have a healthy West Virginia."

Staff writer Linda Harris can be reached at 304-374-0403 or email [email protected]