Hospitals in Chains
Hospitals in Chains Dwight McKenna used to be a staff physician at Dillard University's Flint-Goodrich Hospital in New Orleans. The eighty-seven-year-old teaching hospital was "the life's blood to...
...Humana broke ground for its hospital early this year...
...In February, HCA is scheduled to open a 299-bed general hospital in Baton Rouge...
...Helen Cordes (Helen Cordes recently moved north from Baton Rouge to become an assistant editor of Minneapolis/St...
...The physicians even raised $600,000 as down payment to buy Flint-Goodrich themselves, but National Medical Enterprises prevailed...
...It leaves us without a hospital that we control...
...lately he's been fighting one...
...Paul magazine...
...he circulated petitions, took out newspaper advertisements, buttonholed Lake Charles doctors, and lobbied city and state agencies...
...These hospitals are by and large not concerned with indigent care," says Elton Williams, director of fiscal affairs at Lake Charles Memorial Community Hospital in western Louisiana...
...They argued that unused beds and facilities only drive up health-care costs...
...McKenna was dismissed on June 1. "The sale particularly affects black doctors who depend on the hospital for their practice," says McKenna...
...We're a viable part of the community," says Williams, referring to Lake Charles Memorial...
...The rash of hospital-chain expansion has spread to Baton Rouge, where the nation's largest chain, the Hospital Corporation of America (HCA), is assuming a high profile...
...Williams tried to block the construction...
...What's more, the patients may be losing out...
...it is located on Country Club Drive...
...Hospital Corporation of America made a $240 million profit last year...
...Last May, HCA relinquished its medical and surgical beds, converting the hospital solely into a psychiatric facility...
...But Williams lost his campaign...
...It's going to die a death of neglect...
...Local hospital administrators claimed the beds weren't needed in a city with a 73 per cent hospital occupancy rate...
...There are very few patients now...
...McKenna had led a group of fifty black' physicians at Flint-Goodrich in opposing the sale...
...Williams should know...
...The fate of Flint-Goodrich typifies the problems that hospital chains are bringing to Louisiana...
...But state planners dismissed their criticisms—and then dished out a $1 million low-interest bond for the facility...
...They, too, have departed...
...The future of Flint-Goodrich is not good," McKenna says...
...He argued that hospital chains attract insured patients, leaving the community hospitals to tend only to the poor, who can drain a hospital of its resources...
...In 1981 HCA purchased Hospitals Affiliated International, which owned Doctor's Hospital in Baton Rouge...
...He used to work for a hospital chain...
...Our profits stay in the community—they don't go out to pay 600 salaries in Louisville, Kentucky [Humana's corporate headquarters] or to satisfy stockholders...
...But last March, Flint-Goodrich was sold to National Medical Enterprises, the nation's sixth-largest hospital chain...
...The Humana corporation, the nation's second-largest hospital chain, planned a women's hospital in an affluent Lake Charles suburb...
...The eighty-seven-year-old teaching hospital was "the life's blood to black medicine," McKenna says...
...It is history," says Todd Hamilton, an HCA planning and marketing official in Baton Rouge...
...Flint-Goodrich was the only hospital in the city with a black director of nursing and a black administrator...
Vol. 48 • October 1984 • No. 12
