Study finds Lee County hospital would adversely impact Dougherty County

ALBANY — The Atlanta-area law firm that prepared a report on the impact of a proposed Lee County hospital on Dougherty County, Albany-based Phoebe Putney Memorial Hospital and health care delivery in Southwest Georgia said the planned medical center would significantly and adversely impact the region’s health care.

The Dougherty County Commission authorized the impact study in August.

In a 46-page report summarized for the Dougherty County Commission Monday by County Attorney Spencer Lee, the BakerHostetler law firm said, “LCMC’s (Lee County Medical Center) project will cannibalize the insured patients already served by existing hospitals and needed to support their provision of care to the financially needy.”

The report also suggested that the certificate of need application submitted for the Lee hospital indicates a desire not to serve less affluent patients, such as those covered by Medicaid.

“LCMC will provide only non-tertiary services, which it defines as excluding basic obstetrical care,” the report reads. “Notably, though LCMC could have sought to provide basic obstetrical care, it did not, likely because such patients are largely covered by Medicaid.”

Lee said BakerHostetler did a “fairly exhaustive job on the report.”

“They offer a summary that takes into account socio-economic considerations affecting health care in the region, the health care delivery system in the area, the proposed Lee Medical Center, analysis of negative impact on the region and failure of LCMC to comply with mandatory CON review considerations,” Lee said. “And they backed up all of their summaries with statistical data.”

Lee reminded the board that the impact study was approved by the commission at its Aug. 16 meeting in a resolution that passed 5-2. He said that the county’s letter of opposition to the LCMC CON gave the county the right to express its opposition at a Department of Community Health meeting scheduled for Oct. 17. Also opposing the application and, thus eligible to speak at that meeting, are hospitals in Crisp and Colquitt counties, and the independent Georgia Alliance of Community Hospitals.

Lee said BakerHostetler would continue its service to Dougherty County by representing the county at that meeting.

Dougherty Commission Chairman Chris Cohilas noted what he called a significant finding of the study related to health care costs.

“I found it significant that the study indicates the proposed Lee County hospital will actually charge higher rates, not cut costs as so many have claimed,” Cohilas said. “And I also think it’s important that, lost in all the sabre-rattling associated with this matter, is the fact that Lee County is not applying to build a hospital. A group is applying to build a hospital in Lee County.”

The report says: “To recoup the $124 million cost of the project, LCMC proposes to charge residents more for inpatient services than charged by existing providers.”

Some of the other conclusions of the BakerHostetler report include:

— Socio-economic factors associated with Dougherty and surrounding counties demonstrate that a new hospital is not needed and will constitute an unnecessary cost and duplication of existing services;

— No new hospital is needed because the size of the population of Dougherty County and much of the surrounding area is decreasing;

— Only around 36 percent of the available 932 hospital beds in the surrounding area were occupied in 2016;

— In Dougherty and Lee County alone, there is a surplus of 356 acute-care beds in the area;

— The amount of indigent and charity care proposed to be provided by LCMC is insufficient to meet the needs of Lee County residents, much less the remainder of the service area;

— To be successful, LCMC must redirect insured, non-tertiary patients away from the four safety-net hospitals in the region (Phoebe Putney Memorial Hospital, Phoebe Sumter Medical Center, Phoebe Worth Medical Center and Crisp Regional Hospital), and those institutions are already experiencing deteriorating inpatient demand;

— Phoebe and Phoebe Worth can expect to lose more than 10 percent of patient volume and be impacted by as much as $32 million by Year 2 of the Lee hospital;

— Dougherty County citizens should expect to be impacted by potentially higher property taxes to cover indigent and charity care currently provided by Phoebe;

— Certain costly tertiary services (such as neonatal care and open-heart surgeries) could be eliminated by Phoebe or curtailed.

The report said that “LCMC targets Lee County’s affluent, insured patients to the detriment of the financially needy in the area” and that the proposed Lee facility would “cherry-pick the insured, non-tertiary patients from PPMH (Phoebe), Phoebe Sumter, Phoebe Worth and Crisp Regional.”

The report’s summary left no question as to the group’s findings of the proposed Lee hospital’s impact.

“The only conclusion possible is that the proposed LCMC hospital will significantly and adversely impact the existing health care delivery system, and thus Dougherty County and its citizens,” it said.