I may be a card carrying liberal, but what happened to personal responsibility here? The decision to live rurally has pros (more space, cleaner environment, cheaper housing etc) and cons, one of which is more difficult access to high level care. There is not and shouldn’t be a right to tertiary level care in your backyard.
So yes, some patients will defer care, or delay care if they have to travel an hour Or 2 or 3 to see a (linac, urologist, surgical oncologist, etc). That is a personal decision. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do our best to help them through telemedicine, consolidating appointments, hypoFx, etc, but at some point we have to accept that we are their doctors, not their parents.