One year ago last week, Natchez Regional Medical Center filed bankruptcy, surprising many citizens in the process.

How was that even remotely possible, many locals thought. The hospital board had been paying a slick-talking Philadelphia accountant, Scott Phillips, to help sell the hospital.

Interestingly, Phillips is now touting his expertise in facilitating the ultimate sale on his professional website stating:

“Scott has expert knowledge of the bankruptcy process as well as its implications and obligations on an operating provider of healthcare services.  He recently led the successful financial turnaround and Chapter 9 reorganization of a 179-bed county-owned hospital.”

He’s clearly describing Natchez Regional. How many other county owned hospitals with 179 beds have filed for Chapter 9 reorganization?

Likely none.

For Phillips to suggest he successfully turned around the hospital during its most recent woes is disingenuous.

Phillips did turn around NRMC five years ago, when the hospital first fell into bankruptcy at the hands of Quorum Health Services, ironically a company owned by the hospital’s eventual owner, Community Health Systems.

His firm earned hundreds of thousands of dollars for his services, which resulted in a complete charade of a sales process.

His plans fell apart when no real bidders materialized. He then had to acquiesce and change the bid stipulations to allow the only logical buyer, Natchez Community Hospital’s parent company, to bid.

Or course by that point, the hospital had continued to torch cash, and its hand was clearly tipped to the only bidder, who wisely came in with a low bid, so low that the debts were not fully covered, leading the county to have to borrow more than $3 million just to allow the transaction to close.

The process still surprises and angers me.

Natchez Regional had, approximately a year prior to the bankruptcy, deposited more than $9 million into its account, a settlement of a lawsuit with its former management company, Quorum Health Resources.

That manna from heaven evaporated in less time than the lumbering lawsuit took to go from inception to settlement.

Citizens in Adams County, where the median household income is less than $30,000 per year, were baffled by the huge sums of cash either paid to lawyers and accountants or seemingly incinerated by horrible decisions by the hospital’s former administrators.

Only after the bankruptcy did citizens begin to understand just how rotten the hospital’s so-called leadership actually was.

The “professionals” who were paid to represent the hospital’s best interests agreed to pay one another just ahead of the bankruptcy filing to avoid having their own finances sucked into the unsecured creditors’ black hole.

They did that knowing that at the very same time some hospital employees — along with county taxpayers, potentially — got thrown under the proverbial bus.

Health insurance claims were not paid and the hospital’s own match to Natchez Regional employees’ retirement plan was not paid either.

Today, the matter of how to resolve the unpaid retirement plan funding still sits in limbo.

Many people in the private sector are critical of the hefty public sums that go to fund the public retirement system. It’s far and away above the normal provided in the private sector. While, perhaps, curbing such flush retirement plans should be on the radar screen, it shouldn’t be at the cost of what people were promised by the hospital and Adams County.

Adams County Supervisors need to publicly admit how much cash would be required to get the matter corrected for the affected employees and figure out how to get the shortfalls covered — at least for all except any top administrators who may be affected.

They deserve nothing else.

 

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