There appears to be at least four prospective buyers of ECM at present from the things I have heard. I think you will read more about it in the paper in the next few days. It would appear that things should be moving to completion in 6 weeks or so, right around the March 30 deadline. One meeting I attended, one of the prospective buyers gave his plans for the area and the proposal, and his plan would be to expand services at ECM, of course he also wanted Keller to be in the mix, but they regrettably have turned him down.
Keller will be in the same situation as ECM is currently in, though ECM's is much more dire. Though ECM can continue to pay their debts, they have no money to continue to axpand or purchase new equipment, vital things needed for a health care system to grow. You cannot continuously try to compete with one another, buy multimillion dollar pieces of equipment, and throw money in the wind to advertising, and then not reward your employees with benefits when money gets tight. That is what happened on the north side of the river. There is no need for continous reduplication.
I understand the reluctance of the Keller board and employees to not want to hear anything about a "for profit" model, but the way the hospital systems have to work, they must all function as a for profit, or they will not survive.
The prospective buyer which I heard said that ECM will continue to uphold its obligations to the indigents of the community, so the ones who cannot pay will not be turned away.
The Huntsville system wants to things. First they want to continue to syphon paying patients from the area, while maintaining essential a "triage" doc-in-the-box system where they can treat minor illnesses here, and transfer the others to themselves.
The second reason is they know a for-profit hospital system does several things that will create competition for them.
A for profit system MUST in order to survive, bring in more patients and provide state of the art quality care for them, in today's environment, or they will lose them to another hospital. Let's say we lost cardiovascular surgery here in the Shoals, that would mean Decatur or Huntsville would be the closest place to have that procedure done. The travel time alone to that facility is 45 minutes, and in an emergency, 45 mintues can mean the difference in life and eath. We do not need to lose any service in our area, if anything, we need to be recruiting more specialists to take care of the people we have now.