Escambia County has struggled with providing medical care to its uninsured residents for decades. Baptist Hospital and Ascension Sacred nearly evenly split the charity costs for years, with Sacred slightly ahead and HCA Florida West, a for-profit hospital, handling about $1 million annually…until recently.
According to state reports, Baptist today ranks third behind Sacred and HCA Florida West, carrying only 17% of the hospitals’ charity care costs.
Tracking down each hospital’s charitable care can be confusing. The hospitals closely guard their financial data, and rarely do they publicly criticize each other’s marketing. But how much charity care are the hospitals doing? Not their bad debt write-offs but their actual charity costs.
Inweekly found an independent source. Check out “Who Cares?” in this week’s issue, which goes live on inweekly.net at 11 a.m. today.
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) is about to begin maintenance dredging of the Lower Pensacola Federal Navigation channel in the Perdido Key area. A cutter dredge and hydraulic pipeline will be used to excavate the channel to a maximum depth of 39 feet.
About 1.7 million cubic yards of the dredged sediment will be placed on land and nearshore on Perdido Key from the eastern end of Johnson Beach Road to the eastern tip of Perdido Key Island. Read more.
I was at Baptist twice a few weeks after it opened to visit a neighbor. Like going to the Baptist “Four Season” Hospital Resort. I felt out of place not having worn a coat & tie. Its so new you can still smell the elevator grease. Very interestingly, a Doctor told me that he kinda missed the old hospital. He said that he liked “the type of patients” that he had been seeing at the old hospital. I thought to myself, “Why would the patients at the new hospital be any different from those at the old hospital?” On the floor I visited, there were a lot of empty rooms. A friend asked it it was legal to put the names of the patients on signs outside of certain rooms? I explained that one reason for building the new hospital was likely because rich people would not donate money to improve the old hospital in a mostly Black neighborhood but would give lots of money to be immortalized at the new hospital. (The YMCA Director once told me that rich people would only donate to build a new YMCA if it was in Cordova Park telling me that those of us who lived in Scenic Heights were “the wrong demographic” for the YMCA. The YMCA’s CFO told others that the move south of the airport was all about the money. It always is.) Everywhere you go in Baptist, you see the names of the area’s richest and most powerful people who donated money to be honored for this or that. When I looked a bit too long and adoringly at one of the “small” $10,000 patient room signs honoring someone I know my wife Yvonne said, “Don’t even think about it.” By the way, Baptist may not have formally announced its move until 2019 but if Inweekly could gain access to the secret Baptist Board archives, I think we’d learn that the final decision to move was made in 2016 with property being bought starting in early 2017. I don’t think that Baptist ever intended to provide any medical services for anyone living near the old hospital. I have learned that just because a corporation is a so-called “non-profit” doesn’t mean that they’re running a charity. Some “non-profit” executives are paid a obscenely large salary. (Disclaimer: I go to HCA West Florida and Ascension Sacred Heart and love both.)