Hutcheson Medical Center is seen on Friday, Dec. 18, 2015, in Fort Oglethorpe, Ga. The medical center has not yet reopened, but its reopening is tentatively set for next week.When hospitals fail, communities suffer.
Ask the people of Fort Oglethorpe. Patients get shuffled to care farther from their homes. Ambulances drive nearly 30 minutes longer to get people emergency care. People – as many as 900 – lose jobs or fear they will. Contracts to vendors go unpaid and those folks’ financial health is threatened. But that’s just the hang-nail – not the illness.
That’s why so many people tried to save the 180-bed Hutcheson Medical Center and, for all intents and purposes, kept the dying hospital on life-support for more than a decade.
And it was years too long. Despite effort after effort, bad management and clashing personalities among egotistical and arrogant leaders combined to drive doctors to more stable hospitals and practices. With the doctors, went patients. With the patients, went any hope of increasing revenues. The long goodbye was chronicled in an in-depth five-part Times Free Press series this week by reporter Tyler Jett.
In 2001, the hospital lost $3.8 million. In 2002, the red ink was about $1.2 million. In both 2003 and 2004, the hospital lost over $4 million. In 2005, the hemorrhage was $6.2 million. In all but one of the next nine years, Hutcheson’s trail of red ink ran over. By 2008, the debt was more than $21 million. But that was just for starters.