Haywood Regional Medical Center is on its way to recovery after a small fire in its power room earlier this month knocked out the electrical system, closing the hospital and causing its 62 patients to be shuttled to hospitals in neighboring counties.

There’s a new option for dental care in the region.

“We call it a community service learning center,” explained Michael Scholtz, assistant dean for extramural clinical practices at East Carolina University’s School of Dental Medicine. 

A rash of medical complications hit inmates in the Haywood County jail over the past year, socking the county with a $100,000 cost overrun.

Blame lies in part with a handful of big ticket procedures — a major stroke, heart bypass surgery, a heart catheterization following a heart attack for another. But there was also a run on more minor hospitalizations.

Hospitals in North Carolina face a catch-22 of the worst kind: the $600 million kind, the kind they have no control over, the kind that involves politics.

Hospitals in North Carolina are seeing a financial hit they can ill-afford after state lawmakers in the General Assembly turned down the federal government’s offer to expand Medicaid last year. It would have added 500,000 uninsured poor to Medicaid rolls.

Republican lawmakers in North Carolina are standing by their controversial decision last year to deny Medicaid expansion to 500,000 low-income people who otherwise lacked health coverage.

Some Democrats in the General Assembly are pushing to revisit Medicaid expansion, however. The legislative season had barely gotten underway last week when a group of Democratic lawmakers introduced a bill that would reverse course on Medicaid expansion.

The clock is ticking for the fundraising foundations of Haywood Regional Medical Center and Harris Regional Hospital to spend earmarked money in their coffers to benefit the hospitals.

When Becky Olson first began making house calls, she was barely old enough to walk. She spent her childhood following behind her physician father’s coattails when he made house calls and shadowing her mother, a nurse, through various clinics and classrooms. She saw, too, the bounty that poured into their home from patients who just couldn’t pay her father for his services — at least in monetary terms. 

John Beckman • Columnist

The discussions and debates regarding health care on both the local and national levels have been going on for years as people everywhere have tried to come to grips with rapidly rising costs, a huge number of uninsured people and loss of benefits from  providers. The volume of the discourse has risen to screaming new levels since the passing of the national Affordable Care Act and the botched launch of the website enrollment in recent weeks. The controversy has given rise to many instant geniuses on both sides with much of the opinion being offered short on fact, insight or applicability to the real world the rest of us inhabit. 

What seems to be missing in all this is addressing the underlying question: How does our great nation get health services to those who need it in an affordable, efficient, ethical manner?

By Jake Flannick • SMN Correspondent

Since she started spreading the word about the new health care law, Cynthia Solesbee has encountered many questions — and opinionated remarks — about a sweeping change affecting tens of thousands of people without insurance across the far western part of the state.

Haywood County commissioners are going through the motions of selling Haywood Regional Medical Center to a national hospital chain with little in the way of pomp and circumstance.