OKTIBBEHA COUNTY — With two new members in place on the county board of supervisors, the appetite to again explore privatizing OCH Regional Medical Center is growing.
Toward the end of Tuesday’s supervisors meeting, the board discussed ways it could fund an ever-growing list of projects and requests, such as new equipment for the road department.
District 1 Supervisor Ben Carver pitched a hypothetical — selling OCH.
“It’s budgetary in nature, in the fact that if you were to have a hospital sale and you were to add money into coffers, the things you could do with that — from fixing the county lake to roads,” he said. “I don’t know what all you could do with that money. Sooner rather than later, I want to have some serious hospital discussions.”
Two supervisors — District 2 Supervisor Orlando Trainer and District 4 Supervisor Pattie Little — told The Dispatch this week they would be willing to explore a lease or sale of the hospital. Carver did not explicitly endorse the idea when contacted Friday, but he said he’d be willing to entertain it if it provides long-term stability for the hospital.
District 3 Supervisor Marvell Howard said he was “completely neutral” on the issue. District 5 Supervisor Joe Williams did not return calls requesting comment by press time.
Supervisors are carving out time to meet with OCH CEO Jim Jackson to discuss the hospital’s latest financial audit. Jackson told The Dispatch Friday he will provide the draft’s findings to supervisors before presenting them to the hospital’s board of trustees at its March 26 meeting.
“It’s like a state of the hospital, and that’s what I plan on giving (supervisors) this time,” Jackson said.
In Fiscal Year 2023, the hospital posted a loss of $2.3 million with revenues of $66.3 million, Jackson told The Dispatch on Friday. He said the hospital had to dip into its reserve funds as a result, partly because it longer receives federal COVID relief funds. Its reserve funds stand at $20.5 million.
Jackson said OCH has operated with a “positive bottom line” so far this fiscal year, which started Oct. 1.
When asked Friday, Jackson did not directly address his thoughts on privatizing the hospital.
“We do not want to do anything that affects the quality of care,” he said. “If anything, we want to improve that. We take pride in the fact that we just saw our LeapFrog (safety) score go from a B to an A for the fall of 2023. … That’s evidence that we’re doing some good things despite the challenges.”
Growth opportunities elsewhere
Trainer said OCH may have hit its growth ceiling under county ownership, and a lease or sale could be in its best interest.
“If you’re going to be in business, you’ve got to be in business,” he said, a phrase he used last summer after the hospital posted a loss of $3.3 million in FY 2022.
Trainer also was a loud supporter of selling OCH in 2017, a measure county voters overwhelmingly rejected at the polls.
After the election, OCH opted to affiliate with University of Mississippi Medical Center to expand its services. However, Jackson said in July he didn’t believe OCH had greatly benefited from the affiliation.
As Trainer sees it, the hospital needs to expand on its own, without relying on county millage for funding.
The county sets aside property tax millage each year to repay outstanding debt on prior OCH expansion projects. This fiscal year, the board set aside 3.58 mills, which will provide the hospital $1.67 million. None of that will go toward OCH operations.
“I don’t think it’ll ever come to the point where we’ll have to take county funds to operate the hospital,” he said. “But it’s obvious the hospital will not be able to grow itself based on the income that’s coming in.”
Trainer said he does not believe the hospital is at risk of closure, despite the mounting peril of other rural hospitals in the state. Rather, past investments have not resulted in a larger market share of patients, he said. And if patients seek care elsewhere, OCH could shrink to only servicing “the poorest of the poor, and those that are sick and those that are not able to pay. And what that does is, eventually, that’s going to put more burden on someone in order to maintain the facilities.”
Little: ‘I’m open to whatever we need’
Little, who joined the board along with Carver in January, said her goals for the upcoming meeting are to see how the hospital is addressing its financial and patient-care issues.
If the hospital needs to be privatized to grow, she said she is willing to support that idea.
“If I see that’s the direction it needs to go, I’m very open to that,” she said. “I’m open to whatever we need to do to fix health care for the people in Oktibbeha County.”
Carver said his top priority is the hospital’s long-term sustainability, and he is opposed to solutions that rely on more government funding.
“The markets are changing,” he said, citing the state’s rural hospital crisis that has resulted in some closures. “I’m not so sure the government needs to be in the business of a failing industry when a privately-run conglomerate can piece together several major hospitals and make a profit.”
Howard said he had no opinion on whether the hospital should be privatized, and he is more concerned with providing an update to his constituents.
“At this particular time, I really don’t have any suggestions one way or the other,” he said. “I think there’s a process that we need to take or follow, and let the information gathering process lead us to an opinion or action.”
Kevin Edwards is news editor and reports on Starkville and Oktibbeha County government.
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