TY COBB HEALTHCARE SYSTEM GENERATES MORE THAN
$88 MILLION TO LOCAL ECONOMY
ATLANTA – In 2007, Cobb Memorial Hospital and Hart County Hospital generated more than $88 million in revenue for the local economy according to a recent report by the Georgia Hospital Association, the state’s largest hospital trade association. The report also found that, during the same time period, the two Ty Cobb Healthcare System Hospitals provided approximately $4,379,723 in uncompensated care while sustaining more than 1,233 full-time jobs throughout Royston, Hartwell and the rest of the state. The report revealed that Cobb Memorial and Hart County Hospitals had total direct expenditures of more than $35 million in 2007. When combined with the an economic multiplier developed by the United States Department of Commerce’s Bureau of Economic Analysis, the total economic impact of those expenditures was more than $88 million. This output multiplier considers the “ripple” effect of direct hospital expenditures on other sectors of the economy, such as medical supplies, durable medical equipment and pharmaceuticals. Economic multipliers are used to model the resulting impact of a change in one industry on the “circular flow” of spending within an economy as a whole.
“This new report shows that, even in these difficult economic times, Ty Cobb Healthcare System has an enormous positive impact on our local economy,” said Chuck Adams, CEO of Ty Cobb Healthcare System. “We thank the community’s unwavering support of their local hospital and will continue to work hard to ensure that the citizens of this community have access to health care services that are second to none in quality and affordability.”
While Ty Cobb Healthcare System remains a major component of the area’s economic engine, the hospital’s leadership, like the rest of the Georgia hospital community, is concerned about a wide array of economic challenges that have made it increasingly difficult to meet the community’s health care needs including continued cuts in Medicare and Medicaid payments and a fast-growing uninsured population. Presently, more than a third of all hospitals in Georgia are operating with negative margins.
“We’re extremely concerned with the current operating environment for hospitals,” said Adams. “We’ve made a commitment to every citizen of this community to be on call for them 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. But our ability to do so is being compromised when, in many cases, we’re seeing an increasing number of uninsured patients while the state is paying us far less than what it actually costs to treat Medicaid patients.”
According to Adams, state lawmakers must work to protect the state’s health care system with the same fervor that they do other initiatives like education and public utilities.
“Our local health care system is indispensable,” said Adams. “It is the primary guardian of health in our community and is the key building block for everything else in our community including education and economic vitality. It is our hope that, even in these challenging economic times, that our elected lawmakers will do what is necessary to protect our local health care system and preserve access to health care for every resident of Hart and Franklin Counties.”