How Will St. Mark’s closure impact us?

Three weeks ago (Oct. 12), St. Marks Hospital in La Grange closed its doors due to facing an enormous amount of debt.

According to a report from the Fayette County Record, the hospital closed down due to financial struggles from facing over a $13 million in debt.

Regarding a timeline leading to the closing, St. Mark’s closed its maternity ward in August 2017 and reported in 2018 that it had a $6.2 million loss in the previous year.

In June 2019, a vote to create a taxing entity to help fund the hospital with property taxes failed by a wide margin.

Earlier this year (February), St. Mark’s laid off 64 employees in cutting hospital services.

The closing of the hospital during the past month resulted in 62 more St. Mark’s employees losing their jobs.

The closing left the La Grange community without a place locally to go for emergency care and travel 20 miles or more to hospitals in Columbus, Smithville, Bastrop or Austin. Regarding individual doctor offices, La Grange residents were asked to contact their doctor’s offices to see if they remained open in the community.

The closing of the 18-year old facility in La Grange joined the Weimar Medical Center as the second hospital in the area to close down within the last 11 years. The Weimar hospital closed in 2012, and St. Mark’s is the first rural hospital in the area as well as the state to close since the COVID-19 pandemic.

With St. Mark’s closing, Lavaca Medical Center administrator, Steve Bowen, shared his thoughts on how the closing affects LMC.

“I hate to see that for any community and you don’t ever want to see a hospital close under any circumstances,” Bowen said. “It’s just devastating on everybody in the community.”

Bowen explained the importance of having a rural hospital saying it is two-fold.“First there is a loss of emergency medicine,” Bowen said. “When you don’t have emergency medicine, you’re going to have to drive a distance to the next facility.”

He said that could be very problematic when having a child running a 105 degree temperature or someone having a heart attack

Bowen said the second affect a hospital closing would have is on the economic impact in the community.

“We have a payroll of around $6 million and if you take $6 million out of a community, the economic impact would be phenomenal,” Bowen said. “The goods and services, in not buying locally would have to hurt. Also, hospitals are usually the number one or two largest employers in a community.”

In answering the question, could Lavaca Medical Center ever face closing down Bowen said, “Anything can happen. If the federal government came and said we’re going cut everyone’s Medicare payments 50%, it would create a great hardship on everybody.”

Bowen said however, LMC is very strong financially at the present time.

“I don’t know a lot about St. Mark’s financing, but I know the difference is that it was privately owned,” Bowen said. “They have millions and millions of dollars in debt and that’s probably what caused a lot of down turn for them. We don’t have any long-term debt. We have zero debt and we have a million dollar profit year-to-date.”

Bowen explained LMC’s finances stem from taxes collected being a little over $750 thousand in tax revenue.

However, according to Bowen, the taxes collected do not cover the amount of charity care (those who do not pay their medical costs) that amounts to around $2.5 million each year. The tax revenue only covers about 10 days of operating expenses.

“There are 130 hospital districts and we’re at 119 in the amount of revenue collected,” Bowen said. “We’re basically at the bottom of tax revenue.”

Bowen said LMC gets the bulk of revenue they generate on their own from Medicare payments, commercial insurance and self-pay.

“We’re a critical access hospital, which means on Medicare patients only, we receive our costs and on commercial insurances, our costs are discounted down to what they want to pay us,” Bowen said.

In regards to if LMC can benefit in any way from St. Mark’s closing, Bowen said the hospital had a general surgeon, Dr. Dan White, open a practice here in the specialty suite clinic as well as two other employees coming here to work. In addition, he said their ambulances have brought a few patients to the ER, but for the most part, he assumes, they are going to closer facilities such as Bastrop, Smithville or Austin.

Regarding medical equipment, Bowen said, “I called their administer and asked him if they had anything they might want to sell. But, he told me, ‘we cannot sell anything its all incumbent with a lien against it’. We did receive some of their disposable supplies.”

The closing of St. Mark’s Hospital in La Grange is a tremendous loss to the community and we in the Hallettsville community can be thankful we have a sound medical care facility.