Greenwood and Leflore County officials have only two realistic options when it comes to the operation of Greenwood Leflore Hospital.
They can take the hospital board’s recommendation and proceed quickly to find a large medical facility, most likely the University of Mississippi Medical Center, to operate it.
Or they can sit back and watch the hospital either pare down to a limited provider of medical services — mostly delivering babies and providing emergency treatment — or, worse, shut its doors.
That’s as stark as the choice has become.
It’s been months — some would argue years — that the Greenwood hospital has been heading toward this critical juncture. COVID-19, and all the challenges it created, has only made the inevitable obvious.
Rural health care is in trouble. Declining populations, the difficulty of recruiting physicians and the high proportion of uncompensated or undercompensated care have pushed rural hospitals all over the country to the bring of failure. In Mississippi and 11 other states, the problems have been compounded by the refusal of Republican leaders to expand Medicaid to cover more of the uninsured.
The only way for most rural hospitals to survive is to get bigger. The only realistic way to get bigger is to affiliate with a larger medical institution, which can bring efficiencies and other cost savings while also providing more services to patients because it can spread its larger medical staff around.
The Greenwood Leflore Hospital Board has done its due diligence. Now it’s up to the Greenwood City Council and the Leflore County Board of Supervisors, which jointly have the ultimate authority over the fate of the hospital, to follow the hospital board’s lead and listen to reason.
Several years ago, when the idea previously surfaced to lease the hospital, it was rejected because many in the community didn’t want to lose local control and feared that another operator would cut jobs.
That concern was legitimate then, and it’s still legitimate now. But there is a bigger fear, and that’s that all the 900 people who work at the hospital would lose their jobs if it closes. This community cannot afford to take that chance. It would be devastating both medically and economically, and the damage would be long-term. Forget about recruiting businesses and people to this community if they have to travel 30 minutes or more to find decent medical care.
There is no time to waste in getting a lease agreement in place. Even under an optimistic timetable, it will be the end of the year before a lease can be finalized due to all the steps such a process has to go through under state law. It’s already uncertain whether the hospital will be able to hold on that long in its current state of operation.
The hospital has two to three months’ worth of cash reserves left to cover its operating losses, unless the state or federal governments were to provide sufficient and immediate relief, or local taxpayers were to start covering the losses. Outside relief doesn’t seem likely, and local subsidies (translated as higher taxes) would not be desirable.
If the City Council or the Board of Supervisors has a better plan, let’s hear it, but hear it quickly. If they don’t, they should each vote at their upcoming meetings (the City Council on Tuesday, the Board of Supervisors next Monday) to authorize the solicitation of lease bids from UMMC and any other medical institution that’s interested.
Both the City Council and the Board of Supervisors have been aware for months this decision was coming. An independently operated hospital is no longer sustainable. They must face that fact and save the hospital while they still can.
