The Mice that Roared? Residents Hope Combined Voices Will Bring Change to Hospital

Former patient shared disturbing experiences at Transylvania Regional Hospital in the face of news that Buncombe County and Asheville have joined Brevard's suit against HCA Healthcare Inc.

Brevard Mayor Maureen Copelof stands before a crowd at a “listening session” held by the Community Council for Transylvania Regional Hospital

BREVARD — The people of Brevard are not just underdogs, Mayor Maureen Copeland told a crowd gathered Thursday to speak about care provided by Transylvania Regional Hospital.

“We’re the mice. I’m the mayor of a tiny little town. They’re a massive corporation,” she said, referring to the hospital’s owner, for-profit HCA Healthcare Inc.

“But we’re going to speak with the power and voice of all the people and that power is going to keep growing . . . We’re going to keep trying to get our little mice voices heard.”

What did these voices say at the first of eight “listening sessions” scheduled by the Community Council for Transylvania Regional Hospital?

They are not happy with the hospital or its corporate ownership, and especially not happy with inadequate staffing and the receipt of bills for services covered by Medicare or private insurers. Such repeatedly reported problems could indicate “systemic” issues with the running of the hospital that the meeting was designed to identify, and that the Council will report to HCA, Copelof told about 40 residents at the Rogow Room at Transylvania County Library.

Larry Goodwin, who in the 1990s had managed a drug and alcohol treatment program at the hospital, told of frequent delays in receiving pain medication after a March hip replacement.

What should have been a routine recovery, he said, “was a very painful, excruciating, uncomfortable situation which I know was caused by staffing limits . . . There just weren’t enough people showing up.”

A tearful Ken Voltz said his wife was held overnight in the emergency room after suffering a stroke in January. With no services available for further treatment, he scrambled to find her a bed in a distant hospital he was able to secure only through a friend of his daughter’s.

“After one day of care the doctors told us we would have to get a transfer because they would not be able to do anything more for my wife because of a lack of staff,” he said.

Arlene MacNeil produced a fat stack of bills she received from HCA. The services were covered by Medicare or the excellent insurance she and her husband, who has a chronic heart condition, receive from his former employer, the state of Massachusetts. They got the bills anyway.

When Melinda Wesneksi, of Pisgah Forest, went to Transylvania Regional with a high fever, she was told the cause was a bladder infection and was prescribed a new form of antibiotics.

Wesneski tried to tell the staff that the symptoms matched her several previous cases of pneumonia, which her asthma leaves her prone to contract.

“They wouldn’t listen,” she said.

She was right, she learned after a subsequent visit to a different doctor; she did have pneumonia, she said. And she didn’t hear anything more from HCA until she received a bill for $3,000, which she paid even though company representatives were never able to explain the charges.

“They wouldn’t give details out,” she said. “I just knew I had to pay a $3,000 bill and I had no idea what for.”

Such practices are so common, and so many elderly patients, especially, end up being overcharged, said County Commissioner Jake Dalton, a Community Council member and insurance broker, that he delivered a stark warning to the crowd.

Unless they have confirmed treatment costs have not been covered, he said, “if you get a bill from HCA, don’t pay it.”

The Council was formed after a meeting with HCA Chief Executive Officer Sam Hazen, who traveled from company headquarters in Nashville and, as Copelof told the crowd “very graciously came out here this spring and met with us.” But the company stopped cooperating in June after the city sued HCA, the nation’s largest hospital chain, accusing it of monopolistic practices.

In 2019, HCA paid $1.5 billion to buy then-nonprofit Mission Health, which had purchased Transylvania Regional in 2012.

Its ownership of the Mission’s operations throughout Western North Carolina allowed it to hold a dominant market share in the region, including 79 percent of the market in Transylvania. This, in turn, has led to prices for treatment and insurance far higher than the state average.

That legal action was “beyond disappointing,” Mission’s media relations director Nancy Lindell wote at the time. “We had hoped that meeting (with Hazen) would be the beginning of a thoughtful and ongoing dialog about healthcare in the city of Brevard.”

An email to Lindell for comment about the complaints aired Thursday was returned with an automatic reply saying she was out of town and referring inquiries to her cell phone number or another Mission spokesperson. Neither a call to Lindell or an email to her replacement was returned.

The class-action suit invited other self-insured entities to join the effort and earlier this month, Madison and the two largest and least mouse-like government entities in the region — Buncombe County and the city of Asheville — consolidated an earlier claim into Brevard’s suit.

Mitch Li, an emergency room doctor and co-founder of the patient advocacy group Take Medicine Back, told residents not to expect a response from HCA about their complaints.

“Really, you are going into an empty shell of a hospital that is extracting money from your pocketbook,” he said. “The hospital is not going to change. It’s a wealth-extraction operation, a mining operation for Wall Street.”

Up Next:

The Council plans to hold seven more listening sessions at the following times and locations to reach all areas and population groups in Transylvania County:

Sept. 13: Bethel A Baptist Church, 6:00 - 7:30 pm

Sept. 15: Rosman Town Hall, 5:30 - 7:00 pm

Sept. 16: College Walk Senior Living Center, 3:00 - 4:30 pm

Sept. 19: Cedar Mountain Community Center, 5:30 - 7:00 pm

Sept 19: Spanish Language Session at Sacred Heart Catholic Church, 7:00 –

8:30 pm

Sept. 22: Balsam Grove Community Center, 5:30 - 7:00 pm

Sept. 29: Lake Toxaway Community Center, 5:30 - 7:00 pm

Email: brevardnewsbeat@gmail.com