First steps taken for new hospital

The tentative first steps have been taken to secure a new hospital for Crook County that will replace the aging building in Sundance, using funding taken from the $1.25 billion allocated to Wyoming through the CARES Act. According to Representative Tyler Lindholm, who has pursued this opportunity along with Senator Ogden Driskill, the funds are likely to be made available through a grant.

A bill is currently under consideration that would set up a grant fund for clinics, hospitals and other healthcare facilities to prepare for future pandemics based on data collected from the COVID-19 epidemic.

“That bill is in the very early stages, but I think it’s important to note that our first priority is personal protective equipment (PPE), unemployment, Medicaid, and we can cover all of those things and still have money left,” Lindholm says.

Paying for immediate needs

Would the $1.25 billion be better spent on PPE for healthcare workers and other vital equipment during the height of the pandemic? Lindholm says that the way the CARES Act has been structured provides Wyoming with more than it needs to fill these immediate needs.

“The CARES Act was definitely signed into law for the purpose of this emergency, and how to handle this emergency. How much states got was based on population,” he says.

Had the usual protocols been followed for population-based funding, he continues, Wyoming would have received about $200 million. A bipartisan amendment changed this to ensure each state received a minimum amount, which he says was partly to do with the fact that Wyoming may have a low population, but it also has a large land mass – and thus increased costs for such things as transportation.

“Instead of getting $200 million, we got $1.25 billion, and we’ve been looking at what the Department of the Treasury has released in terms of guidance on how those funds can be spent,” he says.

“The obvious thing right off the bat is that we need to go after PPE, we need to backfill unemployment, we need to backfill Medicaid and those types of things that have been hit exceptionally hard. Those are all the first things that we looked at being able to provide, and that includes purchasing emergency PPE for every community, extra tests and all of those types of things.”

Immediate needs have been a priority for both the legislature and the governor, Lindholm says, but at a rough estimate, they can be met with around half the money left over. With strict limitations on how it can be spent, what should the rest be used for?

“We’ve got another $625 million, so what happens if we don’t spend it? Will the State of Wyoming get a credit from the federal government, will we get an “atta boy”, will we get it knocked off our citizens’ taxes?” he asks. “The answer is no. If we send those funds back to the federal government – and there is a provision in the law that, if you don’t spend that money by December 30, it has to go back – then it will go to other states that have found ways to spend that money.”

Why build a hospital?

Why is it important that Crook County build a hospital, and how is that related to COVID-19 funds? Lindholm says that, first and foremost, the intent is to prepare for the next pandemic.

“The reality is that we’ve got a bunch of these small hospitals across the state that could certainly see someone who is sick with COVID-19 or any other type of pandemic, but they can’t really keep you there and they’re going to have to ship you to a larger hospital,” he says.

“There’s no negative pressure rooms available, there’s no way to contain the virus in the hospital. A hospital that, it’s important to remember, is attached to a long term care facility. There is really no effective way to isolate the disease once it is in the hospital.”

Sundance, along with other towns such as Saratoga, has a hospital with aging infrastructure that was not built with concerns about a pandemic and isolation needs in mind. This is a problem if a pandemic hits smaller Wyoming towns hard.

“We have to ask the question: if we see the pandemic break out in a little town like Sundance, does that mean it’s going to be fine to ship people to Gillette or Rapid City?” he says.

“I think the reality is that, once we’re at the scenario where it’s an outbreak in our little community, it has probably been an outbreak in the larger communities and it’s probably already a wreck in those places. Are they going to have room for our folks?”

The extra funding can either be spent to ensure the county’s needs are met and our people are protected, he says, or sent back to the federal government to serve the same purpose somewhere else.

“I’m going to spend it in Wyoming first,” he says. “There’s no benefit to sending these funds back to the federal government.”

How does this benefit the economy?

Using CARES Act for this purpose has two benefits for the local economy, says Lindholm. Firstly, it will mean that the county gains a new hospital to replace its 50-year-old building with no impact on the community’s taxes. It will be paid for entirely through the stimulus funds.

“On top of spending all that money on a new facility, we will have all those contractors coming into town. We have all these people who will be staying at our hotels and eating in our restaurants, which is the exact economic punch this community needs,” he says. “For me, this is as good as it gets.”

Does the funding come from tax revenue?

There appears to have been a misunderstanding that the $2 trillion distributed through CARES Act is taxpayer money, says Lindholm. Actually, a few months ago, the money did not exist at all.

“The Federal Reserve printed these funds,” he says. “This is a fiat currency at the level of hyper-inflation. I certainly don’t agree with how the federal government came about obtaining these funds, but that’s what they did.”

Printing new money is possible because, like most other currencies, the U.S. dollar is not based on the value of gold or silver.

“It’s based on the good-faith credit of the United States. Because it’s based on a centralized governmental entity, that governmental entity controls how much money is actually on the economy,” Lindholm explains.

“In this situation, they just decided that $2 trillion more would be in the economy, through a process called quantitative easing. They’ve been doing quantitative easing since 2008, printing billions of dollars annually; granted, it’s never been along the lines of trillions of dollars, and that’s what makes this kind of a dangerous situation.”

We know inflation will be coming, and it will be coming at a high rate due to this decision, says Lindholm, so the CARES Act will ultimately mean it costs individual citizens more to buy basic goods.

“But sending that money back doesn’t make those dollars disappear, or contribute to somehow slowing down inflation,” he says. “It just means they send it to another state.”

Lindholm urges the community to contact himself or Senator Ogden Driskill to share your thoughts on the project, whether you are for or against.

“It’s not a great situation and I recognize that, but this is also the hand we’ve been dealt,” he says. “We’ve never seen anything like this before, it’s a wild time, and we’re going to do the best with the hand that we’ve been dealt. I would ask for patience while we try to move through this process and, if I have an opportunity to boost the economy back home, I would ask people to allow me the opportunity to do so.”