Southern Regional Medical Center: AT A GLANCE
Employees and contractors: 1,850 staff and physicians
Emergency Department Visits: 80,057
Medical and Surgical Inpatients: 13,459
Babies Delivered: 3,332
Surgical Patients: 10,506
Charity Care Patients By County
Clayton 79.9 percent
Fulton 7.8 percent
Henry 7.3 percent
DeKalb 1.0 percent
Fayette 0.9 percent
Other counties 3.1 percent
Source: Southern Regional Medical Center. Fiscal Year 2013 Facts
Clayton County leaders will decide Tuesday whether to extend aid to the county’s financially ailing hospital.
The county is considering using money from a proposed Special Local Option Sales Tax, which voters would decide on later this year. Commissioners are expected to vote on a final list of items to be financed by the special tax at Tuesday’s meeting.
Southern Regional Medical Center is seeing more people who are unable to pay from neighboring Fulton, DeKalb and Fayette counties, hospital president and chief executive James Crissey said in a Jan. 15 letter to commission chairman Jeff Turner.
“Over the years, the escalating cost of providing free care to the community without any funding to offset these costs has placed Southern Regional in an untenable position,” Crissey’s letter said. He also noted that the hospital, like much of the health-care field, is operating with less federal and state funding “due to federal sequestration and the impact of the Affordable Care Act.”
The nonprofit hospital, which has served Clayton and the southside for more than 40 years, posted a $20.6 million loss for fiscal year 2013. It has been operating at a loss since 2007. Hospital officials have asked the county for $12 million over the next 40 years to help offset the losses. At the same time, hospital officials have vowed to cut their costs by about the same amount each year by reducing overhead, programs and services.
The county may put $75 million in debt payments — a debt which it hasn’t yet incurred — on the SPLOST list to pay off new 40-year general option bonds Southern Regional Medical Center have asked commissioners to issue to help keep the hospital operating.
At the heart of the matter isn’t just a faltering hospital. Without a hospital, a community’s quality of life suffers greatly, Crissey said in the letter obtained by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
Patients in Clayton would have to drive elsewhere for medical care. Because of its proximity, the hospital is a key part of Hartsfield Jackson International Airport’s Response Plan as well as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The county would lose more than 1,850 jobs if the hospital if it continues to struggle.
Southern Regional’s emergency room is the sixth busiest in Georgia. It sees more than 80,000 emergency room patients a year, many for non-emergency related care, and more than 30 percent of those visits result in “uncompensated care” charges, Crissey told the AJC. In 2013 alone, the uncompensated charges amounted to about $21.6 million in actual costs.
Many Georgia counties, including those in the metro Atlanta market, supplement local hospitals to offset the burden of providing uncompensated care. It has been five years since Clayton contributed to funding for Southern Regional, Crissey said.
“We believe the combination of additional revenues — and matching cost reductions — will sustain Southern Regional for the long-term,” Crissey said.
Turner said the county has been in talks with the hospital since receiving the letter and has discussed a variety of possible solutions, including bonds and property taxes. However, Turner is not keen on the idea of raising property taxes.
“Nobody here wants to raise taxes,” Turner said. “Right now, it’s looking like we’ll consider the hospital as a SPLOST project when we vote on a final list on Tuesday.”
SPLOST would be used to “pay down some of the hospital bond debt,” he said. How much money the hospital would receive from SPLOST has not been determined yet.
But Turner was quick to add that, while SPLOST should give the hospital “some relief to continue operating,” it should not be viewed as a permanent fix. He wants the hospital to look for cost-cutting measures to ease its financial burden.
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