The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) website includes a photograph that shows what can only be described as an idealized version of rural America: a beckoning country lane leading past well-fed, grazing cattle to a large, beautifully maintained and attractively landscaped house and barn. But the statistics superimposed over this bucolic scene reveal a very different aspect of life in rural America: compared to their urban counterparts, rural residents are at greater risk from five leading causes of death, including cancer, heart disease, unintentional injury, chronic lower respiratory disease and stroke.

The CDC site offers advice on how to lower this imbalance: it advises those who live outside of cities to stop smoking, wear seatbelts, stay physically active, eat “right”, and “see your doctor regularly.”  Good advice, all things being equal. But for millions of Americans who would benefit from seeing a doctor regularly, the fact is that good medical care is literally out of reach. Statistics tell us that the situation is not improving: according to a study by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, nearly one hundred rural hospitals have closed since 2010 and, as of 2016, an additional 673 rural hospitals were identified as “teetering.”

This is not a problem that will be easy to solve, and some of the best minds in health care policy are working to find answers to the questions that surround improving rural health. At a recent Northern Virginia Health Policy Forum, attendees heard from Capitol Hill staffers, on both sides of the aisle, discussing the issues and reforms being considered in Congress to improve rural health in our country. Issues such as:

• How to attract doctors, especially family physicians, to rural areas?
• How to ensure that telehealth is being used as effectively as possible, not only to treat patients but to provide physician-to-physician consultation?
• How to expand residency opportunities in underserved areas that will ultimately convince young doctors to stay and practice where they train?
• How to provide rural residents with access to state-of-the-art treatments, which may be available only in high-volume surgery centers?
• And even how to define underserved and rural when they are not one in the same?

It will take innovative thinking, investment of time and resources, and hard work to solve these problems and deliver the needed healthcare to rural communities. Delivering more efficient, more cost-effective health care to the county’s rural residents is not only the right thing to do, it’s also the fiscally responsible thing to do. And that’s something that taxpayers, both urban and rural, will appreciate.