Bassett: New license plate could boost rural health

May 20—Bassett employees have proposed a solution to help struggling healthcare providers in rural New York: specialty license plates.

There is a crisis in rural health care, according to the Bassett Healthcare Network. The residents of rural regions have significant disparities in accessing health care — with greater distances and fewer medical services provided, compared to urban populations.

The services that are more limited in rural areas include elder care, mental health and addiction treatment and health education.

Those facilities that do exist are more difficult for rural residents to access, due to staffing shortages, limited public transportation and internet service, Bassett said in media release on May 17.

Furthermore, "30% of all rural hospitals in the country are at risk of closing in the near future," the Center for Healthcare Quality and Payment Reform said in a report cited by Bassett. The reasons include low financial reserves and overdependence on local taxes and state grants due to hospitals' persistent financial losses on patient services.

"Eighteen percent of New York residents live in a rural community," Bassett President Tommy Ibrahim said in the release. "We are all going to need to find more effective and innovative ways of providing that critical financial support without relying upon severely stretched local, state and federal government funds alone."

Ben Everidge, chief development officer for the Bassett Network, proposed the license plate idea to help rural communities fund key health programs. It's a concept Everidge brought with him when he joined Bassett last year, and he worked with Ibrahim to develop it, he said in an interview on Thursday.

Bassett staff proposed the "Feeling Good Rural" license plate to state lawmakers, and bills have been introduced in both the Senate and Assembly.

Senate bill S. 8616, introduced by State Sen. Rachel May, D-Syracuse, and co-sponsored by State Sen. Peter Oberacker, R-Schenevus, unanimously passed the Senate Transportation Committee on May 3. In the Assembly, parallel bill A.09748 is waiting for a committee hearing.

The program would serve rural health care needs in five categories: "to expand school-based health programs, enhance physician recruitment, improve access to health research and education, expand broadband access for improved access to telehealth, and improve quality of care and services offered by any general hospital" or other residential medical facility, the latest draft text of the bill reads.

Everidge said he was pleased that the bill has gotten "a little bit of traction in the Senate," and was optimistic that it will pass before the legislative session ends on June 2. "The reaction to it in New York was better than we hoped for," he said. "I've seen harder things get passed, let me put it that way."

People like the tagline, Feeling Rural Good, "because there's a lot of pride in living in rural communities," he said. And that is part of the point of the plate, he maintained.

With a $25 fee per license plate, the specialized plates could earn the state $80 million in revenue over a decade, Everidge estimated, most of which would go to a new Feeling Rural Good Health Care Fund.

He based his estimate on a calculation that 10% of the state's 3.5 million rural residents would buy the license plate.

"It's a win-win-win situation for everybody involved," he said. "The state doesn't have to take money out of its treasury to pay for this program. ... The second win is obviously that you've got the healthcare systems that are trying to provide this care, they win because they now have access to more money." The third win is the residents "who get to benefit from that medicine in their neighborhoods, in the remotest parts of New York."

Reports of previous license plate sales suggest that Everidge's $8 million* annual revenue forecast may be optimistic. He based it on a population figure of 20 million residents, but according to Department of Motor Vehicles statistics, there are just 4.2 million vehicles registered in the state.

In addition, the Department of Motor Vehicles already "offers nearly 200 different designs for custom plates representing other causes, professional sports, military and veterans, regions of New York and more," according to the department's website. The Syracuse Post-Standard reported in 2019 that the state's most popular specialized plate, the US Veteran design, sold just 1,663 license plates in a year, earning the state about $64,000. A DMV spokesperson did not return a request for more recent plate sale information.

The point of the plates is not just income, Oberacker said during a phone interview Thursday. "Every little bit helps," he said. "This is really much more to just create the awareness, as opposed to an actual huge revenue stream." *

"It isn't gonna cost us anything initially to institute this. And the benefits? Who knows," he said. He noted that there were just eight working days left in the legislative session to pass the bill, but "hope springs eternal."

* Updated May 19, 2022 at 11:40 p.m. to correct an editing error.

Mike Forster Rothbart, staff writer, can be reached at mforsterrothbart@thedailystar.com or 607-441-7213. Follow him at @DS_MikeFR on Twitter.