It's been nearly four months since La Grange, Texas-based St. Mark's Medical Center closed its doors Oct. 12 over an inability to pay its mortgage debts. While there have been attempts to resurrect the hospital, many remain hopeful it will one day provide care for the community again.
"I would not say confident; I would say hopeful," Dudley Piland, board president and chair of St. Mark's, told Becker's. "It is very frustrating. It's like owning a business that you don't have control of the cash register."
Oxford, Miss.-based Progressive Health Group, a hospital management group, expressed initial interest in taking over the hospital last October, but the plans did not go through.
"They [PHG] have been interested in acquiring St. Mark's and reestablishing a rural emergency hospital, and hopefully one day reestablishing a critical care hospital, going back to providing services that St. Mark's used to provide," Mr. Piland said.
While PHG had initially indicated stepping in as the single member of St. Mark's to assume the hospital's mortgage and liabilities, Mr. Piland said the management group changed its position a few weeks ago and now intends to do an asset acquisition.
After PHG informed the hospital's mortgage holder of its change of plans, the holder filed a mortgage insurance claim with the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development.
The mortgage holder holds the note, with HUD as a guarantor. HUD will now have to provide the money to pay off the holder, where it will then become the note holder.
"Eventually HUD will hold the note. They have indicated that they will sell that note through one of their processes," Mr. Piland said.
HUD has several paths that it can take, but should it hold a public note sale process, the bidder must be qualified.
"They [the bidder] would have to foreclose on St. Mark's to get the asset, and then they could do whatever they wanted to, a shopping center or a nursing home or whatever. As a result of the change in direction by PHG, it's increased the uncertainty of what that asset might become in the future," Mr. Piland said.