Greenwood Leflore Hospital is looking for a new owner for the second time since 2022 and could fail unless the State of Mississippi expands Medicaid, the mayor of Greenwood, Miss., is warning.
The City of Greenwood and Leflore County own the hospital, but they cannot afford to keep the hospital afloat because it’s “financially in bad shape,” Mayor Carolyn McAdams, a political independent, told the Mississippi Free Press on Aug. 25.
“We’ve been trying desperately to come up with ways to make the hospital solvent—we’ve reduced staff, reduced services,” she said.
The hospital has shut down several departments to save money, including the labor and delivery unit, intensive care unit, neurosurgery, inpatient dialysis and urology. The City took out a $10 million line of credit to keep the hospital from closing in 2023, and the Mississippi Legislature is giving the hospital about $1 million through the Mississippi Hospital Sustainability Grant Program passed earlier this year, but McAdams said the grant had not come in yet as of Aug. 25.
The University of Mississippi Medical Center almost took over the hospital last year when it was up for lease, but backed out 72 hours before it signed the agreement, McAdams said.
Greenwood Leflore is currently listed as an acute care facility, but Greenwood leaders applied through the federal government to reclassify it as a critical access hospital. McAdams said on Aug. 25 they are still waiting for approval.
The City published a request for proposal in the Greenwood Commonwealth newspaper on Aug. 29 to attract people to buy or lease the hospital.
Greenwood Leflore is one of many rural Mississippi hospitals that is struggling to stay open. A July report from Healthcare Quality and Payment Reform found that 34 of the state’s 73 rural hospitals are at risk of closing, up from 28 in February. The organization’s CEO, Harold D. Miller, told the Mississippi Free Press in February that Medicaid expansion could help, but also attributed financial problems to low reimbursement rates from commercial insurers and Medicare. He said the Legislature’s grants could “push back the day of reckoning somewhat,” but