Phew! Our community cleared another hurdle in what is feeling like an increasingly dicey journey to keep Greenwood Leflore Hospital from closing.
The Leflore County Board of Supervisors made a lot of folks nervous over whether it would agree to a multimillion-dollar bailout that negotiators said it will take to keep UMMC interested in taking over the nearly broke Greenwood hospital.
The supervisors spent a lot of time Friday arguing among themselves and with a number of onlookers about whether it was wise or risky to amend the draft of a resolution that commits the county to splitting the roughly $9 million bailout with the hospital’s co-owner, the city of Greenwood.
The debate and the friction it creaked were generally pointless.
Whether UMMC’s name was removed from the resolution as the only potential leasing entity didn’t matter, say hospital officials. If the lease goes through, the county will be obligated to make sure UMMC is not stuck with $3.5 million worth of deferred maintenance or about $5.5 million in a Medicare loan that the Greenwood hospital doesn’t have the cash to repay.
Nor does the pledge to seek an irrevocable line of credit from the bank firmly commit any party to the lease deal. UMMC could still back away. Either the city or county could do the same. So could the state College Board, which has the final say on any lease into which the state-owned medical institution enters.
What the line of credit does is assure UMMC that if there is a takeover, it won’t be assuming debts that were never intended to be part of the deal. It guarantees UMMC that Greenwood and Leflore County are acting in good faith.
Rather than worry about language that doesn’t matter, the county and city officials should be losing sleep about what does: whether the Greenwood hospital can hold on long enough to get a lease finalized.
Since this summer, the hospital has been working on the assumption that it only had to tough it out until early December. That assumption was based on a timetable that had everything but College Board approval accomplished by the end of September, early October at the latest.
When negotiations dragged out longer than expected, and when the process was thrown a curveball by a couple of senseless Medicare and Medicaid regulations, everything got backed up further. UMMC informed the hospital that there was now not enough time to put together the complicated legal documents to have them ready for the College Board to consider at its last planned meeting of the year on Nov. 17.
That means, we are told, that it will be mid-January before the College Board will be able to take up the matter. There’s not enough cash to last that long, say hospital officials, without further austerity measures, such as the job cuts and elimination of services that have been put into place over the past several months.
I am starting to wonder whether more cuts in services is the best short-term strategy to buy time.
Since May, when that became the concerted approach the administration took, the hospital has been losing an average of $2.7 million a month, not factoring in the coronavirus relief payments that have lessened some of the bleeding. In the previous seven months, the average loss was right at $2 million.
The financial reports for September, the last month reported, illustrate what could be a case of penny-wise and pound-foolish. The hospital — having eliminated labor and deliver, intensive care and most inpatient services — saw net patient revenues drop steeply, down $4.4 million, or 47%, from the year before. Meanwhile expenses were actually up almost a half-million dollars.
Gary Marchand, the interim CEO, explains that one reason for the disconnect is that even though some services were eliminated, the hospital was still contractually obligated to pay physicians who had previously rendered those services. Those physician payments will phase out either this month or next, but by the time the savings start showing up on the hospital’s balance sheet, it could be too late.
Regardless, waiting until January for the College Board to weigh in is not set in stone. Although the College Board doesn’t traditionally meet in December because of the holidays, it could. Its website says Dec. 15 has been reserved if the chairman calls for a meeting for an emergency.
This IS an emergency. If our hospital ever closes, it may never reopen, no matter how sincere are UMMC’s or anyone else’s intentions. If it closes, Greenwood will be hit with an economic blow to which it may never fully recover. Almost certainly there will be medical casualties that could have been avoided.
Someone with clout needs to get on the horn and start lobbying the College Board members to delay their Christmas celebration and meet in December.
Not to sound overly dramatic, but the life of this community could hang in the balance.
- Contact Tim Kalich at 662-581-7243 or tkalich@gwcommonwealth.com.
