May 21, 2024
A Center Square article in Wednesday’s edition of the Sun-Gazette is both alarming and frustrating.
Thirty-three hospitals have closed in Pennsylvania in the past 20 years. Fifteen have closed in the most recent five years.
The increasing risk of a lack of access and choice in health care, we believe, should alarm everyone in our state.
What we find frustrating is that at least parts of the solution to this trend are quite evident: Pennsylvania needs jobs and housing to retain and grow the number of families living in Pennsylvania. Hospitals and clinics will always have a much tougher time staying open if the number of potential patients is steadily falling.
In order to entice employers to create jobs in Pennsylvania, developers to build new housing and families to fill both those jobs and those houses, we need to reduce cumbersome obstacles that inflate the costs and slow the process of creating new jobs and housing and we need to offer an economic climate where people can have confidence they can prosper if they buy those houses and apply for and accept those jobs.
Unfortunately, our state’s efforts at permitting reform have been too slow. Worse yet, our efforts at tax reform are both too slow and overshadowed by excessive state spending — spending that prompts entirely reasonable worries that taxes in the future will be unacceptably higher.
We can only remind our elected officials in Harrisburg how interconnected these issues often are, and once again encourage them to recognize what their constituents need to invest in the futures of Pennsylvania’s communities.
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