Reginald Moore, Robert Collins and Eric Mitchell say they desperately do not want Greenwood Leflore Hospital to close.
They say they understand how important the 117-year-old hospital is to the medical and economic well-being of this community.
Their action this week sadly says otherwise.
The three members of the Leflore County Board of Supervisors have put the hospital in heightened jeopardy by reneging on a deal to provide stopgap funding until the fate of the hospital’s application for critical-access status is determined.
On Wednesday, after weeks of delay, the three supervisors voted to reject what should have been a routine request for another $1 million draw on the $10 million line of credit the county secured for just this purpose.
If the three supervisors maintain their opposition, the hospital should be able to squeeze together enough money to keep the doors open this month, but next month may not be so certain.
So why are the three supervisors doing this, after having signed on just a few months ago to a strategy — agreed to by the county and the hospital’s other owner, the city of Greenwood, as well as the hospital board and administration — that these entities and their consultants concluded was the hospital’s best option for survival?
There is a logical explanation and a political one.
The logical explanation is the three have now decided that putting more taxpayer-backed funding into the hospital is the proverbial “throwing good money after bad.” They have decided that the hospital’s application for critical access — the most vital piece in its survival plan — is doomed now that it has been turned down at the regional level. They say that never before has a critical access hospital been created by getting the folks in Washington to override the ruling of the regional regulators.
We don’t know whether that’s true, since there have been hospitals in this state — Rep. Bennie Thompson said he was involved in two of these applications — in which a waiver has been obtained from the federal government for the same rule that has tripped up Greenwood Leflore Hospital: namely, the rule that says a critical access hospital must be more than 35 miles away from other hospitals.
But even if their claim is true, there really is no other sensible course than to stick with the strategy and see if Thompson’s clout with the Biden administration — plus the back-up of Mississippi’s two senators — can produce what the three supervisors say would be a first.
Now for the possible political motivation. The three supervisors could be miffed because the Greenwood City Council ignored their call earlier this week for a major meeting to discuss the hospital. The three are certainly unhappy that their effort to change the voting dynamic on the hospital board and in the process overhaul the hospital’s administration was thwarted by the city. As a result they are flexing what muscle they do have on the hospital by pulling shut the purse strings.
If that is the case, it is certainly petty of the three to make everyone unsettled — including some 570 employees at the hospital — in order to satisfy their political egos.
All that a move like this does is encourage those same employees to start looking elsewhere for work, thinking that their jobs are not secure. If that happens and drops in staffing levels turn into additional cuts in services, the three supervisors will have engineered a self-fulfilling prophecy. They will have undermined the hospital, pushing it into an insolvency that with a few more months’ patience may have been avoided.
They need to rethink what they have done before it’s too late.
