Franklin County’s medical options shrink

If it’s difficult to find a bad guy in the story of the closing of the Franklin Medical Center, the only hospital in the county north of Wake, it’s because there probably isn’t one. The closing is a blow to the county’s economic development efforts, to be sure. It’s hard to sell a community if there is no hospital.

But Franklin has just over 60,000 residents, and almost 90 percent go outside the county for health care, according to Novant Health, a Winston-Salem company that has owned the hospital since 2009.

Indeed, the bad news for Franklin County comes because of the good news of a number of viable health care options in the area, with UNC Health Care and Duke reaching out with clinics and smaller facilities all over the state, and buying existing ones.

Would expanding Medicaid, which North Carolina foolishly elected not to do (though the federal government would have paid the expense), have saved the hospital? Probably not. This seems to be a case of a facility that simply couldn’t draw enough business in a time when competition is fierce and smaller facilities have a tough time of it when people want to use the high-profile places like Duke and UNC.

All this said, the powers-that-be in the state’s major medical facilities, along with officials of the Department of Health and Human Services, ought to be looking for ways to provide emergency care in rural areas, through doctors’ practices or other alternatives. North Carolina has a lot of isolated communities where people can go to hospitals out of town but have no options for sudden, serious health problems.

This story was originally published October 8, 2015 at 6:27 PM with the headline "Franklin County’s medical options shrink."