Vote on Grady governance today
by Andy Phelan
andy@dekalbchamp.com
Grady’s governing board will vote today whether to make the fundamental change in the way it is run, said the authority’s Chairperson Rep. Pam Stephenson [D-Lithonia] at a recent community meeting.
The debate began in June when a metro Chamber of Commerce task force, headed by Georgia-Pacific’s Pete Correll, said the venerable institution “is on the verge of economic collapse.”
To fix it, he said, the hospital must find new sources of funding and change the way it’s run.
If not, said Correll, co-chairman of the 17-member Greater Grady Task Force, “a patient tsunami will sweep across the metro area that will be unprecedented.” The findings, part of a study commissioned by the Fulton-DeKalb Hospital Authority that governs Grady, showed the system is losing about $7 million a month.
The chamber, led by the area’s most prominent business leaders, said the change would help the struggling system find new sources of funding once politics was removed from the board. The authority is run by members appointed by DeKalb’s CEO and the Fulton County Commission.
Since this summer, Grady has borrowed an additional $25 million from both Fulton and DeKalb counties, the only local governments that directly fund the hospital.
Opponents of the change say it’s not a governance problem but a lack of funding, especially from the state, which is killing Grady. The change from a public non-profit to a private non-profit 501(C)3 is nothing more than a “white power grab.”
Now Emory and Morehouse universities, which supply Grady with its doctors and are owed more than $50 million collectively from the hospital, are “exploring alternative venues for our programs in the event those deliberations are unsuccessful.”
At the same community meeting Stephenson appeared, Gov. Sonny Perdue told the audience the state’s stance that it is not in the business of owning hospitals and that a change in governance to a non-political board “better serves the people.”
“It’s in no one’s best interest for Grady to fail,” said Perdue. “We hope to find a sustainable model where the hospital doesn’t have to beg all the time. We’ll also pursue more aggressive forms of reimbursement.”
Currently the state only reimburses Grady 85 percent of its costs to care for patients covered by Medicare. In 2005, that amounted to the hospital losing $144 million in uncompensated care.
If the board does vote to change governance, it would still own the hospital system but turn the day-to-day operations over to the private non-profit.
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