Whipped Cream Difficulties

Or, what do you do with an apparently abandoned hospital that you can’t unload?

Today’s Statesman has an article about the hospital situation in Lakeway. (For those unfamiliar with Austin geography, Lakeway is a rapidly growing part of the greater Austin area, located west of Austin proper, out near Lake Travis.) I happen to be interested in this story for reasons I’m not sure I can talk about, but there’s some things in it that are worth blogging about.

Basically, there were plans for two hospitals. One is the Lakeway Regional Medical Center, which is going to be a pretty large complex (complete with labor and delivery facilities). The other was Lake Travis Transitional Medical Center, a smaller (46 beds) facility that started out as a “transitional facility”: “the hospital would be aimed at patients who were recovering from a traumatic injury or had some other serious medical problem and needed to be hospitalized 25 or more days.” At some point, though, plans changed and Lake Travis Transitional became a direct competitor of Lakeway Regional.

The 46-bed facility, which also has been called Lake Travis Specialty Hospital, was supposed to open earlier this year. The building has the necessary occupancy permits, but “there’s no furniture or equipment inside,” DeOme said.

The owners of the smaller Lake Travis hospital apparently have been trying to sell it; St. David’s HealthCare was approached, but it declined, a spokeswoman said. An official with the larger Seton Healthcare Family did not call back, and Scott & White Healthcare said it had no acquisition plans to announce.

Another twist:

The Lakeway Regional hospital received the biggest-ever loan guarantee that the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development had ever given to a for-profit hospital: $166.9 million. That guarantee “will save an estimated $91.2 million in interest expense over the life of the loan,” said HUD’s March 2010 news release.

Lake Travis Transitional asked HUD for information about the loan, but HUD wasn’t forthcoming. LTT sued HUD:

U.S. District Judge Sam Sparks of Austin determined that HUD had to turn over most of the documents Lake Travis sought. In a Sept. 26 order, he said HUD had behaved unacceptably and should pay Lake Travis Transitional Medical Center $10,350 to cover its lawyer fees and $350 in litigation costs.

Nobody with Lake Travis seems to want to talk to the Statesman these days.

Two smaller hospitals are within 10 to 11 miles of Lakeway Regional: Seton Southwest Hospital and the Hospital at Westlake Medical Center. The full-service St. David’s South Austin Medical Center is 15½ miles away, according to Yahoo maps.

My personal opinion is that this is slightly misleading. The distances the Statesman gives are accurate, but to get to Seton Southwest you have to travel Texas 71; traffic frequently backs up, especially in Oak Hill, and there have been a lot of serious (fatal) accidents on that stretch of road. The Hospital at Westlake is, I think, a little better to get to. Bee Cave Road isn’t as bad as 71. But The Hospital at Westlake strikes me as being more of a boutique hospital than a general practice one. It seems like the kind of place that people go to for plastic surgery, not where you’d go when your left ventricle seizes up.