Published Monday, July 28, 2008

Cancer center seen as negative

Cancer Treatment Centers of America (CTCA) is a privately held, for-profit, Illinois-based company that owns and operates small hospitals that cater to insured or otherwise affluent persons seeking treatment for various oncological (cancer) conditions. In 2008, CTCA successfully lobbied the Georgia legislature to enact special legislation which exempts it from other laws that not-for-profit, community hospitals must comply with through Certificate of Need laws. CTCA has approached officials in several counties, including Coweta, seeking financial inducements to build a specialty cancer hospital.

In 2005, Coweta's community rallied behind Piedmont Healthcare in Piedmont's quest to bring a long-needed, state-of-the-art hospital to Coweta County. The promised new $175 million facility is well into the design development phase and is still on track for a groundbreaking later this year. Our community is now poised to support a new facility which is designed to offer a broad scope of high quality service to its citizens.

Should CTCA be built here, it will compete with Piedmont Newnan Hospital for medical and surgical oncology services, targeting insured patients. Medicare, Medicaid, under-insured and un-insured patients are not patients to whom CTCA caters. While Piedmont Newnan Hospital would continue its community mission to treat patients unable to pay for their services through the emergency room, CTCA has no such obligation. Additionally, the proposed CTCA hospital would conceivably be opening about the same time our new facility would be. The implication there is that the CTCA facility will be competing for an already inadequate supply of skilled nurses and technicians, negatively affecting our ability to appropriately staff our new acute care hospital when it opens.

I certainly hope that the citizens of this county will take heed of the negative implications of CTCA building a hospital here and would be equally appalled as I that representatives of local development agencies might financially encourage such.

G. Michael Bass

(Bass is president/CEO Piedmont Newnan Hospital)