By Hap Fry | The Denver Gazette
Editor’s Note: Colorado’s healthcare system is entering a period of accelerating instability — a “tsunami,” as multiple leaders describe it — driven by collapsing hospital finances, shrinking Medicaid reimbursements, disappearing services and a political fight over who is responsible for this unraveling. Healthcare Freefall is a multipart series examining how Colorado arrived at this moment, what H.R. 1 will do next and why communities across the state are bracing for deeper shocks.
Be it Thanksgiving, Christmas or the Fourth of July, Longenecker could always bank on someone arriving at her family’s doorstep in Limeport, Penn.
More often than not, those visitors would be locals from the area with no family ties — other than the fact that they were often in need of seeing her father, who happened to be the only doctor in the then-rural community of 2,000.
“There wasn’t a holiday that went by that someone wasn’t knocking on our door,” Longenecker said. “He would always see them and treat them. I understand what rural communities are like, and also the challenges of attracting a physician in those communities.”
Longenecker is now far removed from rural Pennsylvania, but she hasn’t lost her rural bearings.
She lives in Greeley and serves as dean of the University of Northern Colorado’s College of Osteopathic Medicine, which opened in July with its first class of 81 students as the state’s third medical school.
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