Celebrating an unusual event: re-opening a rural hospital

Blake Farmer reports from Brownsville, Tennessee, population 10,000, where a rural hospital has reopened nearly a decade after it closed. The headline is, "After a decadelong spate of closures, one rural Tennessee hospital reopens," and here's the lede: 

When a rural hospital closes, it usually closes for good. A lot of smaller cities and towns in this country have lost their local hospital care, which is why a hospital reopening in Brownsville, Tenn., is a big deal. Here's Blake Farmer of our member station WPLN.

BLAKE FARMER, BYLINE: The sun is rising over the Haywood County Community Hospital, and Michael Banks stands out front in a seersucker suit, welcoming back employees in the dim light.

JEANINE ING: There's no backing out now.

MICHAEL BANKS: All right. Go get your stuff set up. Let's get ready to rock and roll.

FARMER: Banks is a local attorney who was chair of the hospital board. Now he's CEO.

BANKS: So I remember getting called into that office right there by the CEO at the time and him telling me that they were closing. And that was in 2014.

FARMER: This hospital was part of a wave of closures that hit states that have refused to expand Medicaid to cover the working poor. In all, 16 rural hospitals closed in Tennessee - more than anywhere but Texas.

BARRY DUNAGAN: This building has sat here for six or seven years with no air circulation, no water in the lines. Everything just deteriorates.

FARMER: Barry Dunagan is back as head of maintenance after eight years. The mothballed hospital was handed to the local government, and Dunagan assumed it would be bulldozed.

DUNAGAN: It takes a world of work to ever get it back.

FARMER: But it's really happening. They're down to installing the doorstops for the first phase of renovations. A new company out of Florida called Braden Health acquired this and three other hospitals between Nashville and Memphis. It's one of a handful of companies trying to resuscitate closed rural hospitals now that communities are practically giving them away. But it takes millions of dollars to get them going, even if everything goes right. Braden Health's Terry Stewart says the Haywood hospital was supposed to open in January.

Don't miss the entire story, a rare hopeful one when it comes to rural healthcare infrastructure.