LaFayette is following in the footsteps of Chickamauga and buying an old Hutcheson Medical Center clinic.
Before the hospital closed, and before a private company bought it, Hutcheson ran a collection of community clinics, located in Chickamauga, LaFayette and Trenton. But with the public hospital on its last legs, administrators shut down the clinics in the fall of 2015 because they were losing money.
City Manager David Hamilton said the City Council wants the clinic because members want a health care provider that’s open late at night, in case of an emergency.
“I wouldn’t say there’s been an outcry [from the public],” he said, “but we’ve had several people tell us we need it.”
LaFayette offered to buy the building, located on East Villanow Street, for $250,000 in November. Earlier this month, a bankruptcy judge overseeing Hutcheson’s estate approved the deal.
Hamilton said the transaction still isn’t technically finished. The city and Hutcheson’s trustee have not yet signed all the paperwork, but he hopes the deal will be finished in the next couple of weeks.
If the purchase is final in the next couple of weeks, Hamilton said the City Council will try to strike a deal with a local health care provider to run the operation. They would be following the leaders of Chickamauga and Dade County, both of which bought Hutcheson’s old clinics in 2015 and leased them to CHI Memorial Hospital.
A spokesperson for Memorial could not say last week whether hospital administrators have talked to LaFayette officials about taking over the clinic. Hamilton, meanwhile, declined to say whether Memorial is at the table. But, he said, the city has talked to multiple health care providers.
“Our intention would be to do something similar” to what Chickamauga and Dade County did, Hamilton said. “We don’t have all the details worked out. But we wouldn’t be interested in being the health care provider.”
The LaFayette clinic, like those in Chickamauga and Trenton, struggled financially in the hospital’s final years. According to Hutcheson board reports, the LaFayette clinic lost an average of $313,000 a year from 2010-13.
In 2014, the board reports show, the clinic actually turned a profit of $184,000. Then, in 2015, the operation lost $250,000.
Kim Plant, a 22-year Hutcheson employee who was the director of clinics until the hospital shut down, said she isn’t sure why the LaFayette operation had a surprisingly good year in 2014. The patient load seemed about the same then as always: about 25-65 people every day. (The Times Free Press could not find any documentation confirming patient populations at the clinic.)
But, Plant said, the clinic’s struggles didn’t have anything to do with how many people showed up every day. The clinic stayed busy. The issue, she said, is that a lot of patients had Medicaid and Medicare, government insurance programs that rarely reimburse providers at the full cost of the work performed.
Plant said some other patients didn’t have insurance at all, costing the clinic more money. But regardless of its bottom line, Plant said the clinic was an asset to the community because people were able to show up for urgent care or to see a primary physician from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m.
“[Patients] were upset,” she said of the closure in 2015. “That was the clinic they went to. That was the only clinic open on Saturday and Sunday in the area.”