Certificate of Need News
OUR OPINIONS: Medical need is real
2/27/2009
Gwinnett County residents deserve to have hospital that can provide open-heart surgery
It took Marietta's WellStar Kennestone Hospital nearly a decade to break the monopoly on open-heart surgery, held for years by a handful of Atlanta hospitals. Gwinnett Medical Center - the largest hospital in the state's second-largest county- should not be similarly thwarted in its efforts to offer the lifesaving procedure.
State health-planning regulators last month approved the Gwinnett hospital's request for a Certificate of Need to establish a $33 million cardiovascular center. Predictably, several metro-area hospitals have already lined up to challenge the decision. Piedmont Hospital, Emory University Hospital and Emory Crawford Long Hospital - all of which have made money by treating Gwinnett County residents - want the state to reverse the decision.
Their protests are obviously about protecting finances, not patients. Any Gwinnett resident who comes to Gwinnett Medical Center's emergency room with symptoms of a heart attack and in need of surgery must be stabilized with clot-dissolving drugs and then transferred somewhere else. In Atlanta's traffic, such delays can cause the loss of life.
Read this article by Mike King from the July 15, 2008 issue of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
