I live in a pretty rural area. We have a hospital and urgent care 12 minutes away, though for anything that isn't immediately life threatening I'd be driving an hour for much better hospital care in a larger city.
There are definitely more rural areas, that just depends on where you draw the line on what is considered "rural".
This area is unincorporated and the nearest towns all have a few thousand people or less.
When we moved here I was actually surprised that we had a hospital in one of those small towns. Its part of a larger network that and the city an hour away has a big training hospital and med school, I assume that's why there's a smaller hospital in our area.
For reference, our only "grocery stores" withing 45 minutes are Walmarts and Dollar Generals.
Hello stranger! No need for a throwaway account for such an insightful comment. I thought exactly the same when I read the article.
Yeah, it is a bullshit/clickbait article. No healthcare? Yeah, let's see how long his wife will put up with that. And, literally, there is zero cost for heat. Do you know how cold that place is in the winter? Here is what he wrote:
> as far as heat goes, well, one could either pay a little extra in electric for that — or they could have the Amish deliver their scrap wood from their sawmills to burn in a wood stove, very cheaply.
To be clear: That's not zero. Another lie.
Still: This person should setup a YouTube channel to document their life. It would be like the boring/suffering version of people who sail around the world on a yacht.
To be fair, at $0.04/kWh, even at very low outdoor temperature, a heat pump at COP only a little bit above 1 or even an electric resistance heater is not very expensive to operate. If you have anything resembling decent insulation and you heat only a small space, heat can be very inexpensive. Even in an old, uninsulated, drafty house, you can fudge it cheaply with window insulating film and by hanging fabric on the walls. (Those cheap cut-to-size cellular window shades sold at many home improvement stores also have excellent thermal performance.)
It gets tricky if you want a civilized humidity level, though. You need to control leakage to achieve decent humidity and you need to control condensation to avoid damaging the window trim or other parts of the structure and to avoid growing mold.
I also wonder how close it is to the nearest hospital or urgent care.