Local hospital news encouraging

I find it encouraging that Baptist Memorial Hospital is acquiring OCH in Starkville. This means that the hospital is in a strong fiscal position. It needs to be wealthy, because when Medicaid is slashed, it will lose a lot of business. We really, really need our local hospital. Should I need emergency treatment (and at my age, that is a distinct possibility), I do not want to suffer a 90-minute ambulance ride.

Columbus is a relatively prosperous city for its size, but operating a hospital is an incredibly expensive proposition. Many rural hospitals are closing their emergency rooms for twelve hours each day, because they cannot afford to keep them open 24/7. Since ERs are required to treat indigent patients, and because ER staff are among the most expensive staff in any hospital, ERs are money sinks. People near such hospitals must hope their car crashes happen at the right time of day.

In poorer towns, hospitals are getting buried in debt. Should they close, access to health care will be savaged. It is perhaps a sad truth that these hospitals depend on Medicaid for survival, but it is a fact. Since Medicaid will either be slashed or even eliminated, we will need to find an alternate way to fund hospitals (probably by increasing charges).

Or maybe not. There seems to be an attitude in our nation that if you cannot afford to live, you should die. Here in Columbus, there are several private organizations providing food and other needed stuff to the indigent, but there is no way that any charitable group can subsidize our healthcare; it is just too expensive.

Mississippi is actually at or near the top in two hospital categories. We rank third after the Dakotas in beds per 1,000 people with 3.87. We are the top state for rural emergency hospitals and may add two more soon. This is a 2023 program enacted under Biden as a lifeline for struggling rural hospitals. Hospitals with this designation receive $3.3 million from the feds every year. The catch is that they must close their in-patient facilities. Any patient must be moved to another hospital within 24 hours. The system is like an ICU for hospitals on code blue.

Five rural hospitals have closed in our state in the last five years. Thirty-seven percent are facing immediate risk of closure, 52% face some risk of closure and 64% have experienced losses of services, according to the Center for Healthcare Quality and Payment Reform.

For many health issues, a citizen of Columbus must travel to Tuscaloosa or even Birmingham to find a specialist qualified to deal with them. For some issues, one must travel to Atlanta. We need to do everything we can to preserve the access to healthcare we still have or even try to expand it. Letting the poorest die, by cutting Medicaid, for example, will, in fact, only reduce the medical options for all of us.

Bill Gillmore
Columbus