James_March-April_2026_web - Flipbook - Page 40
Georgia’s rural hospitals have a
$137 billion economic impact and
directly employ 165,000 Georgians
directly and an estimated 500,000
indirectly, she added. “Healthcare
is infrastructure, just like schools. If
you don’t have access to high quality education and healthcare, new
economic development projects
become harder and harder to do,”
she says.
UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES
“The trickle down effect in
hospital and healthcare financing
as well known, is that when you
pull a thread, there are unintended
consequences,” she says. “People
will continue to seek care, they’ll
just be uninsured. That will drive
up the cost of uncompensated care
for hospitals and put further pressure on how they make decisions
on the care they are able to provide
pursuant to their mission.”
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Healthy Georgia hospitals
contribute to a fund to help those
that are struggling through a “bed
tax” on paying patients. But even
that may be in jeopardy due to
federal changes. Georgians also
have the option of receiving $1 of
credit against their Georgia income
tax bill for each dollar donated to a
needy Georgia hospital.
There are other bills in the
works that could help, including
one that would allow local voters to
impose a sales tax for hospitals. Other projects, including schools and
roads, are also competing for those
so-called local option sales taxes,
and hospital advocates might face
an uphill battle to convince voters to
approve one for a hospital.
PRIVATE HOSPITALS
The outlook is much different for
private healthcare companies operating in urban areas. One of those is
Atlanta-based Pruitt Health which
offers services including skilled
nursing, home health, senior health
and hospice care. Eighty percent of
Pruitt patients are either Medicaid
or Medicare. It has employees in 150
of Georgia’s 159 counties.
For Pruitt, one of the biggest
challenges is finding enough
healthcare workers, says its CEO
Neil Pruitt. Last year, the company
hired 12,000 people. “That’s good,
but we still had several thousand
vacancies,” Pruitt says.
Training and educating nurses
is a key issue for the company. And
Pruitt is encouraged by the opening
last year of a new nursing school at
the University of Georgia. It will offer both undergraduate degrees in
nursing. “There is light at the end of
the tunnel, but it’s still very much
of a challenge for us,” Pruitt says.
He also likes PACE, a new program for patients with both Medicare and Medicaid, which helps
elderly patients stay out of nursing
