Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, September 10, 1995 TAG: 9509110018
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-4 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: STEPHEN FOSTER STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
One billboard, which travelers heading into Radford see on their left, advertises Montgomery Regional Hospital's "Regional Family Care Center." The clinic is in the Radford Shopping Plaza. "Walk-ins welcome," the board says.
The other board, facing outgoing Radford drivers, reminds them of one of the more recent endeavors of Radford Community Hospital, a facility owned by Roanoke's Carilion Health System. "Introducing Mother and Baby HomeCare Services to the New River Valley," it says.
The two billboards stand back-to-back.
The New River Valley's hospitals - and their owners, Columbia/HCA Healthcare Corp. and Carilion - fight tooth and nail for customers. Adjacent billboards are one example. Competing bids to build a new hospital are another.
Carilion-owned Radford Community wants to build a new hospital just outside Radford. Montgomery Regional and Pulaski Community, both owned by Columbia/HCA, want to build a facility within the city limits. Citizens can comment on the two proposals at a public hearing Monday night at 6:30 in the Radford high School auditorium.
Getting area doctors to comment on the competing proposals is darn near impossible. Some professionals involved in health care have said summarily that competition is good for the patients. However, they wonder if a protracted legal battle won't translate into higher costs. One person employed by a Radford physician said the situation smacks of political grandstanding and puts "doctors in the middle of a situation that should never have happened." Another professional called it just plain "silliness."
Montgomery Regional President Gene Wright, who once worked for a hospital in the Louisville, Ky., area, where more than 10 hospitals operated, is used to the competition for patients. "I don't think it's any different in the New River Valley than anywhere else," he said.
Hospital administrators alternate between respect and disdain when talking about their competition.
"We're aware Radford [Community] is here," Wright, who also is chief executive officer of Montgomery Regional, said a few weeks before his hospital announced its plans for Radford. "They're both fine hospitals."
Meanwhile, the application from Montgomery and Pulaski asserted that area citizens could be well-served even if Radford Community didn't exist.
Asked what he thought about that, Radford Community's president and CEO, Lester "Skip" Lamb, said he could "turn that around" and say the potential patients would be as well-served without one of the other two institutions. "Our position is that we've got a darn good case an we're going to sell it," he said.
In July, Lamb accused Pulaski Community's President and CEO Chris Dux of spreading misinformation in the debate.
Just last week, in referring to the competing applications, Dux wrote, "I think it is clear to anyone who reads the applications that one of the proposals would serve the health care needs of the public while the other proposal serves more the needs or egos of the applicant."
On the surface, there are the most obvious of differences in the proposals.
Radford Community, it reveals in a 76-page document, would construct a new health center with 97 beds at a cost of $60 million on a site just outside the Radford city limits and convert the existing hospital into something else. Because Carilion is nonprofit, it pays no taxes, although a Radford Community-commissioned study said eventual development of the surrounding area would bring in $650 million in new investment, 17,000 jobs and $7 million in tax revenues.
Montgomery Regional and Pulaski Community hospitals, in their 30-page proposal, say they would spend $25 million total to build a 50-bed facility within Radford, thereby ensuring the city tax dollars, and would lower the number of beds at the existing hospitals by 25 apiece.
The graphic on Page 3 is intended to point out some of the details contained in the two volumes that perhaps don't make the headlines.
by CNB