By Phil Galewitz, The Palm Beach Post, Fla. Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News
Jun. 17--Bethesda Healthcare System Inc.'s history of caring for the poor helped it beat out JFK Medical Center in Bethesda's bid to build a new hospital west of Boynton Beach, according to documents released Monday by the state.
Atlantis-based JFK Medical was also hurt because state officials questioned its plan to take 80 beds from its sister HCA facility, 150-bed Columbia Hospital in West Palm Beach. That move may have helped the new hospital, but state planners said it would lead to overcrowding at Columbia.
Friday, state health officials chose nonprofit, Boynton Beach-based Bethesda Healthcare to build the first new hospital in Palm Beach County in 20 years. The proposed $74 million, 80-bed hospital will be built on Boynton Beach Boulevard just west of Florida's Turnpike. Bethesda will transfer 80 beds from its 362-bed Bethesda Memorial Hospital on Seacrest Boulevard to the new hospital.
With three years needed for design and construction, and likely regulatory appeals to the decision of the state Agency for Health Care Administration, the hospital is not expected to open before 2009.
Though the state said in January that the region needed no more hospital beds, an exception was made because the average occupancy at south county hospitals last year was 77 percent, documents show. Delray Medical Center, which is 8 miles from the new hospital site, had argued that there was no need for a new hospital.
In deciding who should get more hospital beds, the state gives preference to hospitals that have a history of serving the poor and uninsured. Bethesda, largely because of demographics around its Boynton Beach hospital, treats a far higher proportion of poor patients than for-profit JFK.
About 16 percent of patients at Bethesda Memorial in 2001 were covered by Medicaid, the state-federal health insurance program for the poor, the state documents show. About 7.3 percent of JFK patients were covered by Medicaid.
Further, Bethesda gave away a considerably higher proportion of care compared to JFK. Charity care comprised about 3.7 percent of the hospital's charges in 2001, compared with 0.4 percent at JFK, documents show.
Both Bethesda and JFK promised to treat a certain proportion of Medicaid and charity care patients at the proposed new hospitals -- 5 percent and 10 percent, respectively.
JFK officials declined to comment on the report Monday.
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(c) 2003, The Palm Beach Post, Fla. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News.
