A shot in the arm for rural health

An ongoing story in Georgia, and not a happy one, is the chronic struggle of rural hospitals to survive. The state’s most sparsely populated areas are also in many cases its poorest (southwest Georgia a familiar case in point), and access to medical care is a problem for many people under the best of circumstances.

Closing the only hospital within 100 miles is among the worst of circumstances.

That has already happened four times in the last three years, with a hospital in nearby Stewart County among the casualties.

The Georgia General Assembly passed a law earlier this year that could be the difference for some rural and small town hospitals. Starting next year, individuals and organizations that make contributions to hospitals on a list of eligible facilities will get a state tax credit.

State Department of Community Health Commissioner Clyde Reese said the list is complete. (WABE, Atlanta’s National Public Radio affiliate, reported that between 35 and 50 hospitals are expected to be included.) But the department wants the approval of the Governor’s Office before making it official.

Jimmy Lewis of Hometown Health told the radio station that the bill should have tremendous impact — positive impact — on rural hospitals.”

Let’s hope he’s right. The trend in recent years has been that medical care is least available where it’s most desperately needed.

So unnecessary

The Judicial Qualifications Commission oversees, among other things, the conduct of Georgia judges. Until Friday its chair was Appalachian Judicial Circuit Chief Judge Brenda Weaver. Not only did she resign both the chair and her seat on the commission, but she is now under its scrutiny.

Weaver, you might remember, is the judge who ordered a north Georgia newspaper publisher and his attorney indicted and jailed on identity theft charges for obtaining subpoenas seeking spending records for the judge’s office. (The men were released the next day and the charges were subsequently dropped.) The judge said the court was not bound by state Open Records Law, a curious enough claim; but it got really weird when she contended that copies of checks in the records could be used by the publisher and the lawyer to gain access to her office’s money.

And here’s the kicker: The judge’s office account information the publisher and his lawyer were seeking has been made public and, according to the AJC, the records “do not suggest any impropriety.”

A little extravagance, perhaps: More than $12,000 of the judge’s $50,000 budget was spent on food last year, including one fancy Blue Ridge restaurant dinner for the state Supreme Court, spouses and staffs with a taxpayer tab of $2,400, and a barbecue lunch the next day for more than $2,000.

“Why didn’t she just release the records?” asked Russell Stookey, the attorney who spent the night in jail for trying to see them. “I can’t understand what’s the big deal.”

It wouldn’t have been a big deal then. It is now.

This story was originally published August 16, 2016 at 4:50 PM with the headline "A shot in the arm for rural health."