Greenville-based Vidant agreed in April to operate the hospital until July and provide $1 million if local officials would provide an additional $2 million. A Vidant executive said the town wasn't ready as of June to take over the hospital.
"After multiple attempts throughout the 90-day extension to contact the town of Belhaven to help coordinate plans for assuming hospital operations, the lack of response made it apparent that the town knew that it did not have a plan to take over hospital operations," Vidant Community Hospitals President Roger Robertson said the day before the closure.
O'Neal took to task both hospital officials, who he said are putting profits over people's health, and elected state officials, who refused federal funding to expand Medicaid that would pay the bills of poor people. "Profits are more important to them than lives," O'Neal said Monday of hospital officials.
Medicaid expansion is important to rural hospitals, which rely on foundations and charitable gifts to survive, he said.
Vidant Health officials said in September they would close the hospital in May, in part because North Carolina lawmakers refused federal funding to expand Medicaid that would pay bills of poor patients. Vidant CEO Dr. David Herman said the hospital had provided more than $2 million in unpaid healthcare since 2011, when Vidant took it over.
"The condition of the 60-plus-year-old building, changes in new healthcare regulations and declining patient volumes led us to move up our plans to change the model of healthcare in Belhaven to better meet the needs of the community," Robertson said in a statement Friday.
About half of all states have refused to expand Medicaid under President Barack Obama's healthcare law, adding to the pressure on hospitals. But the problem of maintaining rural hospitals, which tend to operate on narrower margins, has existed for decades.
Researchers from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill studied the economic impact of 140 rural hospitals across the country that closed during the 1990s. They found that within a few years the community's unemployment rate was about 1.6 percentage points higher and the per capita income fell by more than $700.
Beaufort County's unemployment rate was 8% in May, compared with 6.4% for the entire state.
O'Neal said the fight for the hospital could determine the economic future of a community surrounded by rivers and sounds. "Not only have they taken emergency room services away from our town, they're also taking every industry we've got away — which is retirees moving into our area. They're not going to move to an area without a hospital," O'Neal said Friday.
O'Neal and North Carolina NAACP President Rev. William Barber also planned to meet Monday with members of the state's congressional delegation. He's hoping for a meeting with White House officials or U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder.
The NAACP has filed a complaint with Holder's agency, which helped facilitate the agreement that kept the hospital open until this month, seeking an investigation into whether the hospital's closing violates the Civil Rights Act.
