Just what does anyone expect to happen?

The Guardian tells us of the perils of capitalist health care:

'How many more people have to die?': what a closed rural hospital tells us about US healthcare

With the vicious callousness of the capitalist counting his money the hospital was closed, necessitating travel to gain health care.

Dunklin county already has one of the highest post neonatal mortality rates in Missouri. Dr Andrew Beach, one of the few paediatricians left in Kennett, said the entire region of about 70,000 people is now without a full-time obstetrician.

Hmm, well, that “entire region” there is doing a lot of work. For what is actually being faced here is a basic problem of population density. Dunklin County’s population has been falling for near on a century now. It’s definitely smaller than it was in 1950 and the decline doesn’t show any signs of stopping. The county, as opposed to the region, population is now below 30,000.

So what does happen when a population shrinks? The infrastructure supporting it does too. Certain things operate at certain appropriate scales. Hospitals among them.

Take, for example, our own dear NHS, that most definitely not capitalist health care system. Efficient hospital size is taken to be some 200,000 to 300,000 people in the catchment area. Which is why all those small rural hospitals have been closing ever since 1948.

The actual lesson we get from a proper examination of the numbers being that the capitalist lust for profits retained that rural hospital rather longer than the rational planning of socialism would have done.

But then telling the true story wouldn’t have suited The Guardian, would it?