The long, slow and horribly shameful demise of Natchez Regional Medical Center is nearly over.

Monday morning, a federal bankruptcy judge is expected to approve — likely begrudgingly — the hospital’s bankruptcy plan.

Approval of the plan is the last step to clear the way for the sale of Natchez Regional to Community Health Systems, a Franklin, Tenn., company that operates more than 200 hospitals across 29 states.

For Adams County taxpayers the sale cannot come soon enough, though it’s a bit of a bittersweet pill to swallow.

Once the crowning jewel of southwest Mississippi’s medical community, Natchez Regional was run into the ground by a potent combination of ignorance and arrogance.

Hospital leaders — before most of them clammed up many months ago — suggested the hospital’s demise was caused by outside influence — changes in hospital reimbursements, federal audits that pulled money directly from the hospital and all other sorts of scary-sounding, complex bogeymen.

While it’s difficult to decipher bits of information that have trickled out of Natchez Regional in the past several months, a few things are obvious.

The hospital’s management was inept and made some horribly fatal decisions, perhaps none more damaging than former CEO Bill Heburn’s decision to create the Natchez Medical Foundation.

Initially suggested to be a way to raise private funds to help the hospital, as it turns out the foundation’s main goal was simply to serve as an entity to lure physicians to join the hospital and allegedly offer them state retirement benefits. The onus of ensuring the physician practices had positive cash flow was on the hospital’s management.

Woefully inadequate doesn’t begin to describe the symptoms employees privately point to as evidence of a horribly diseased administration.

The hospital did not have regular staff department head meetings for more than a year, employees said. Worse still many of the physicians employed by the hospital were never properly credentialed so the hospital or foundation could properly bill for their services.

It doesn’t take a $100,000-per-month hospital consultant to realize that’s bad business.

The last hospital bankruptcy filing suggests non-secured creditors of the hospital may — emphasis on may — be repaid 58 cents for every dollar owed, but it will be two years before all of this unwinds.

Believing that, of course, requires a huge leap of faith in the hospital’s own word, particularly since the public has been told everything would be OK since early in the bankruptcy process.

Initially, even before the bankruptcy was filed, employees who questioned what would happen with benefits that had not been paid, all were told, “Don’t worry, every obligation will be paid in full.”

That has proven a false statement as the hospital’s losses apparently continue.

A reader asked me last week why the newspaper didn’t do more to uncover the “real numbers” from the hospital. Now that the whole thing is winding down, perhaps some further explanation is in order.

For nearly two years, this newspaper has worked hard to get information from the hospital. Unfortunately the state’s loophole in the Sunshine Laws makes that difficult.

The newspaper invested thousands of dollars in legal opinions and research to discover how to gain more information from the hospital’s operations — from the amount of the multi-million dollar settlement with the hospital’s former management company to the amount being paid to the former CEO.

Unfortunately, we learned the only hope for gaining insight into the hospital was through the Adams County Board of Supervisors. They as the rightful public representatives of the hospital’s owners should have been able to demand answers from the hospital board of trustees.

We pressed the supervisors, both publicly and privately to seek help in the hospital matters. Unfortunately, they sat on their hands for far too long. When they did start asking more questions and demanding answers, the downward death spiral had begun.

When the judge makes his ruling Monday, regardless of the outcome, it will be the close to a sad and costly chapter in Adams County’s history. Hopefully, we can learn a few lessons, but for now they may be too painful to realize.

 

Kevin Cooper is publisher of The Natchez Democrat. He can be reached at 601-445-3539 or kevin.cooper@natchezdemocrat.com.