Closed hospital concerns residents

By Rupert Howell
All eyes were on Quitman County Hospital Administrator Jeffery Geraci Friday morning when that county’s board of supervisors held a special meeting that turned into a public forum on the recent hospital closure announced late last month.
Approximately 65 people witnessed Geraci say a large infusion of cash would not solve the hospital’s financial woes, stating only an infusion of imported patients would help.
He said the hospital was averaging three regular patients and two swing-bed patients daily.
Changes in health care over the last two years, a reduction in Quitman County’s population and the loss of employers were several reasons cited as contributing to the privately owned hospital’s unsustainable losses.
Geraci explained that procedures such a knee surgery two years ago even while done in another hospital could have put a patient in QCH for a three-day recovery.
Now that patient is sent directly home, he explained.
While a loss in population and loss of employers would obviously affect the hospital’s census, Geraci explained a primary source of income was through emergency room services that by law are offered to “anyone who walks through the door.”
But the hospital has no recourse to make people pay for those services, he said, explaining that in urban areas, the threat of damaging someone’s credit rating would usually be enough incentive for them to pay either the hospital or collection agency.
But that incentive doesn’t work in Quitman County and the hospital and collection agencies have little or no success in collecting past due ER accounts totaling hundreds of thousands of dollars.
While a few tried to blame Quitman’s supervisor board, that board’s president, Manuel Killibrew, explained the hospital was privately owned and encouraged those attending to call friends and acquaintances to help find a solution to the hospital closure.
Geraci said the recent sale of Batesville and Clarksdale hospitals to Curae Health, a not-for-profit rural health care company, could have a huge impact on Quitman County health care, stating those hospitals’ former owner Merit-Health, was “Really not a rural health care company.”