Rural Tennessee hospitals near Kentucky border remain closed as the Volunteer State keeps spurning expansion of Medicaid

Jellico Medical Center is defunct. (KFF News photo by Taylor Sisk)

By Taylor Sisk
KFF Health NewsJELLICO, Tenn. — In March 2021, this town of about 2,000 on the Kentucky border in the shadow of Pine Mountain lost its hospital. It's in Campbell County, which ranks 90th of Tennessee’s 95 counties in health outcomes and has a poverty rate almost double the national average, so losing its health care cornerstone sent ripple effects through the region.

“That hospital was not only the health-care lifeline to this community,” said Tawnya Brock, a health-care quality manager and a Jellico resident. “Economically and socially, it was the center of the community.”

Since 2010, 149 rural U.S. hospitals have closed or stopped in-patient care, according to the Cecil G. Sheps Center for Health Services Research at the University of North Carolina. Tennessee has had the second-most closures of any state, with 15, and the most closures per person. Texas has the most, with 25. Neither state has expanded Medicaid under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, as has Kentucky, where only four hospitals have closed.

Jellico Medical Center was a 54-bed, acute-care facility. When it closed, some 300 jobs went with it. Restaurants and other small businesses in Jellico also have gone under, said Brock, who is a member of the Rural Health Association of Tennessee’s legislative committee. And the town must contend with the empty husk of a hospital.

Dozens of small communities are grappling with what to do with hospitals that have closed. Sheps Center researchers have found that while a closure negatively affects the local economy, those effects can be softened if the building is converted to another type of health care facility.

In Jellico, the town owns the old hospital building, and Mayor Sandy Terry said it is in decent condition. But the last operator, Boa Vida Healthcare of Indiana, holds the license to operate a medical facility there and has yet to announce its plans for the building, leaving Jellico in limbo. Terry said local officials are talking with health-care providers that have expressed interest in reopening the hospital. That’s their preferred option. Jellico does not have a Plan B.

“We’re just in hopes that maybe someone will take it over,” Terry said. Meanwhile, the nearest emergency rooms are a half-hour drive away in LaFollette, Tenn., and in Corbin, Ky.

MapQuest map, adapted by Kentucky Health News

An hour and a half away in Fentress County, the building that once housed Jamestown Regional Medical Center has been empty since June 2019, when Florida-based Rennova Health — which also previously operated Jellico Medical Center — locked it up.

County Executive Jimmy Johnson said Rennova’s exit from Jamestown was so abrupt that “the beds were all made up perfectly” and IV stands and wheelchairs sat in the halls. About 150 jobs evaporated when the center closed.

Rennova still owed Fentress County $207,000 in taxes, Johnson said, and in April the property was put up for auction. A local business owner purchased it for $220,000. But Rennova was granted a year to reacquire the building for what it owed in back taxes, plus interest, and did so within a few days.

Abandoned hospital buildings dot the map in Middle and East Tennessee. In West Tennessee, some shuttered hospitals have found new life.

The closing of McKenzie Regional Hospital in 2018 was a blow to the local economy. But Baptist Memorial Health Care, which operates a hospital in nearby Huntingdon, bought the assets — including the building, land, equipment, and ambulance service — and subsequently donated the building to the town of McKenzie.

Cachengo, a technology company, ultimately took over the space. Because of hospitals’ electrical infrastructure, the site was a perfect fit for a business like his, said Ash Young, Cachengo’s chief executive. Young said Cachengo is now looking into repurposing abandoned hospitals across the country.

Jill Holland, McKenzie’s former mayor and a local-government and special-projects coordinator for the Southwest Tennessee Development District, believes the town can become a technology hub. “It’s opening a lot of doors of opportunity for the youth in the community,” she said.

But in Jamestown, the vacant hospital is “deteriorating,” said Johnson, the county executive. “It could have been used to save lives.” Rennova did not respond to a request for comment.

The University of Tennessee Medical Center opened a freestanding emergency room elsewhere in Jamestown, sparing residents a half-hour drive to the closest ER. Johnson believes the old hospital building could serve the community as housing for those who are homeless or as a facility to treat substance use disorder.

Brock, the health-care quality manager, thinks things will get better in Jellico, but the community has had its hopes dashed more than once.

Brock believes a freestanding emergency room could be a viable solution. She urges her community to be responsive to “a new day” in rural health in America, one in which a hospital must focus on its community’s most urgent needs and be realistic about what that hospital can provide.

“Maybe it is just the emergency room, a sustainable emergency room, where you could hold patients for a period of time and then transfer them,” Brock said. “And then you build upon that.”

She added, “There are options out there.”

KFF Health News, part of the Kaiser Family Foundation, is a national nonprofit newsroom producing in-depth journalism about health issues.