Your hospital and the November election: Why you should care
Your hospital and the November election: Why you should care
A ballot initiative could change the way the board is appointed
Dothan has two hospitals. One, Flowers Hospital, is owned by the for-profit company Community Health Systems. It answers to shareholders.
The other, Southeast Health, is a not-for-profit health system. This means it takes excess revenue and re-invests it in the system. It has a CEO and other officers, but they answer to a Houston County Health Care Authority, more commonly referred to as the hospital board.
Much of the revenue that comes to the hospital comes from patients or insurance/medicare reimbursements, but some comes from local tax dollars.
There is an ongoing dispute here about how board members are selected. Technically, a committee provides a list of nominees to Houston County commissioners, who in turn select from the list to come up with the 12-member board.
Some on the County Commission believe the hospital circumvents the process by stacking nominees to ensure it gets the board members it really wanted the whole time. The hospital fears County Commissioners would dole out political favors if it had more say-so in who is on the board and that it would not operate in the best interest of the hospital.
A Constitutional Amendment giving the commission more appointing authority is on the ballot in November.
These opposing points of view were articulated in recent articles, one from County Commission Chairman Brandon Shoupe and the other from board member Dr. Walter Young.
Read Shoupe’s piece here.
Read Young’s piece here.
Educate yourself and vote what you believe is best, because both men make reasonable arguments.
The language of the amendment blurb on the November ballot reads:
Relating to Houston County, proposing an amendment to the Constitution of Alabama of 2022, to authorize the elected members of the Houston County Commission to appoint members to the Board of Directors of the Houston County Health Care Authority to ensure the public interest of the residents of Houston County. (Proposed by Act 2024-1)
The entire text of the amendment can be viewed here.
You should be interested in how your hospital is doing. Health care is the largest economic engine in the city and surrounding area and of course you should know if your hospital is fulfilling its mission.
Information can be spotty. Hospital boards are not subject to Alabama’s Open Meetings law. I wish they were, but I also understand that Southeast Health and Flowers Hospital are competitors and not everything needs to be shared.
Despite the board’s meetings not being under the Open Meetings law, there is still a lot of publicly-available information.
There are some side-by-side comparisons by looking at the American Hospital Directory free profile for Flowers here and Southeast Health here.
The most recent yearly financial audit for the Health Care Authority can be found here.
It is worth noting here that you can see if your doctor or surgeon has been disciplined by the Alabama Board of Medical Examiners by looking here.
You can also search to see if a nurse has been disciplined by the Board of Nursing by name or license number here.
Medicare keeps track of a number of ratings metrics for hospitals, nursing homes, rehab facilities, home health, Hospice care, etc. You can search and compare here.