Another rural hospital is in danger of shutting down in the coming days

Rural hospitals across the state — and country — are in trouble, urgently. Labor and supplies are getting more expensive. Federal Medicaid cuts are projected to cut into their revenues. 

And places like Inyo County, on the eastern side of the Sierra Nevada, face the prospect of having to close key medical facilities.

Southern Inyo Healthcare District, one of two hospitals in the county, had eight days of cash on hand as of Sept.12, the hospital’s chief executive told our Kristen Hwang. Hospitals usually have more than 200 days of cash on hand. 

Local officials have sent a letter requesting an emergency $3 million from Gov. Gavin Newsom to stabilize the facility.

• The letter says: “If doors close, thousands of elderly and rural Californians will be left without access to critical healthcare, creating a true medical desert in another region of the state.” 

Here’s Kristen: 

Located in Lone Pine, a town at the base of Mt. Whitney with just 1,300 residents, Southern Inyo Healthcare District is the only hospital within a nearly 60-mile radius. It’s the closest stop for injured hikers and dehydrated tourists visiting Whitney or nearby Death Valley, which regularly receives over 1 million visitors per year. Without it there would be a 136-mile stretch between the next closest hospitals in the eastern Sierra Nevada.

The only hospital in Northern California’s Glenn County said three weeks ago that it would shut down by October.

This week, the federal government’s aggressive immigration raids came to Chicago. 

The man behind them, Border Patrol leader Gregory Bovino, is also the architect of the raids across California this year. 

Our reporters Sergio Olmos and Wendy Fry have been on the ground covering Bovino and his agents since the first day of their surprise January raid in Kern County. 

You can get caught up on their reporting through these two videos: 

• Masked, armed and forceful: Finding patterns in California immigration raids
• Border Patrol Says This Raid Targeted Criminals. The Evidence Says Otherwise

The Trump administration has eliminated billions of dollars in science grants to universities. 

If the universities want to try to get their research funds back, the Supreme Court says they have to go to an obscure court to do so. Our higher education reporter, Mikhail Zinshteyn, takes a look at that court. 

He writes that the modern Court of Federal Claims, in existence since before the Civil War, was created by the Tucker Act and is the venue for contract disputes with the federal government. For example: a company hired to build a bridge would Uncle Sam if it hadn’t gotten paid. 

• David Marcus, UCLA law professor: “I had never spent more than three minutes in class even mentioning the existence of the Tucker Act, and it would never have occurred to me to do so before this spring.”