Once forefront of Mississippi’s hospital crisis, Greenwood Leflore ‘on track to break even’

Greenwood Leflore Hospital, one of the largest in the Mississippi Delta, helped start the media flurry regarding the state’s ongoing hospital crisis. Now, it looks as if GLH is on track to break even for fiscal year 2024, according to Greenwood Mayor Carolyn McAdams.

McAdams joined MidDays with Gerard Gibert at the Mississippi Municipal League’s annual conference in Biloxi this year. With thousands of listeners tuned in and over 200 municipalities in attendance at the Mississippi Coast Coliseum, McAdams took people by surprise when giving an update on the status of GLH.

“Even though Greenwood Leflore Hospital was on the verge of closure, we’ve hurdled that gap,” the Democratic mayor said.

This comes less than two years after it was reported that GLH was going to close down if not leased out by a larger, richer health system such as the University of Mississippi Medical Center. Once UMMC decided to halt negotiations in November 2022, GLH officials warned that time was waning if more money didn’t find its way to the struggling hospital.

With the help of various sources such as city and county allocations, drawing from its $10 million line of credit, and shutting down a handful of services, GLH found a way to stay open through the end of 2023 and then announced plans to be open through December 2024. In April, the second leg of Republican Gov. Tate Reeves’ Medicaid reimbursement reform – his alternative to full Medicaid expansion – was approved by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and instantly delivered some financial relief to hospitals in need such as GLH.

With the additional $10 million annually that GLH receives from the plan that reimburses hospitals at the upper level of Medicare’s payment limit, helping cover the cost of uninsured patients as required under U.S. law, McAdams said it’s been enough to put GLH “on track to break even.”

“Greenwood Leflore Hospital is going better with what the governor did for the Medicaid reimbursements,” she said. “That has at least put us on track to break even. At least we’re not bleeding financially like we were.”

McAdams added that GLH has even brought back some services after previously having to shut down departments that included the labor and delivery unit, intensive care unit, neurosurgery, inpatient dialysis, and urology.

“We’ve brought back some services [and] opened up a few more of the ICU beds. So, in all, it’s doing much better,” she said.

While McAdams did not expound on what the numbers currently look like for FY2024, which ends on Sept. 30, even being close to breaking even would be a huge turnaround for GLH. Net pension liability as of Sept. 30, 2023, 2022, and 2021 was $16.4 million, $18.9 million, and $9.5 million, respectively.

Another bump to GLH sustaining for the foreseeable future would be the approval of the hospital’s request to receive critical access status. A CMS regional office in Atlanta, Ga., previously denied the request, but McAdams and company are hopeful the national CMS Office in Washington, D.C. will override that decision. If that happens, GLH will begin receiving 101 percent of the cost for care of their Medicare patients, in addition to what Reeves recently had approved by the federal government.

“We’re still waiting on the critical access approval from the federal government, and hopefully by the end of the year, we will either have a yes or a no on that,” McAdams said. “We would be in really good standing if we were able to get that.”

Even with GLH’s seemingly rapid turnaround, the hospital crisis remains a dire problem, with recent data from the Center for Healthcare Quality and Payment Reform showing 38 of the state’s 73 rural hospitals are in danger of closing.