(In case you don’t recognize the photo, that’s the Roosevelt Warm Springs Rehabilitation Center in Warm Springs, GA, and, while it is considered a ‘hospital’, it does not provide acute care. It is located in Harris County.)
Hospitals that provide ‘acute care’ are EXPENSIVE in more ways than one. I am not talking about going in as a patient either. I am talking about just opening the doors and keeping the place afloat. The price tag is just horrendous. But that might be about to change at least a little bit.
Of course, one of the most expensive obstacles is getting permission from somebody to allow you to do this. It’s called getting a ‘Certificate of Need‘ (CON). Basically, it means that you have proven to the all-knowing pooh-bahs that the current and “future” growth of the area will be enough to generate sufficient income to keep the hospital solvent for a period of time. This depends somewhat on the type of hospital you want to open. Are you asking for a hospital that will deliver primary care, surgery, labor and delivery, etc. or will it be a specialty hospital like the one above that does nothing but rehabilitation?
Georgia is one of the states that has not fully expanded Medicaid. One of the reasons that we have the problems with rural healthcare is BECAUSE of this CON requirement. You can’t build within 35 miles of another facility. BUT, there is a bill in front of the General Assembly that would allow free-standing specialty centers such as “birthing centers” to be built within those limits1
For the record, as a lifetime worker in healthcare, I think this is a giant step forward. This would enable professionals to provide healthcare services to populations of patients that are currently underserved and LITERALLY dying for lack of available and timely care. Frankly, I think that many doctors and nurses who currently refuse to even consider working in rural areas do so because they know that they would be cut off from having a place to send their patients to if they needed more care than they could provide in their office. That scares the ____ out of them for many reasons and I do not blame them. The fact that it leaves all these people up the creek with leaky canoes and no paddles is just another complication.
Add in our State leaders like Brian Kemp who bungled the Covid response from start to finish and left so many rural Georgians (including one of my family members) sick, in a small town, and with absolutely no bed to be had. He wound up in a hospital in another STATE (about 250 miles) away and dying. Gee, thanks, Mr. Kemp. Could not have done this without you.
Other family members were working themselves into the ground just trying to provide some semblance of care to sick patients coming from all directions. Why? Because there was not enough places to provide care in thinly populated areas. Why was that? Because Georgia’s Republicans cannot get it through their heads that expanding Medicaid creates jobs, improves the health of communities, and increases our economic wellbeing. All they can think of is that it provides healthcare to poor people. Got news-you are going to do that one way or the other and the other is more expensive.
Let’s tell our Senators and Representatives to pass this measure and get these places built and operating. I really do not care at this point who gets to cut the opening ribbons. Let’s just get it done.
Endorsed by
P.O. Box 3816, LaGrange, GA 30241 http://www.wright4georgia.com ellen@wright4georiga.com
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