Brody School of Medicine "at risk"

Published January 25, 2015

Editorial by Greenville Daily Reflector, January 24, 2015.

East Carolina University administrators spent much of last year lobbying the State Legislature to reverse funding changes that have left the Brody School of Medicine at risk. The General Assembly’s 2015 long session was barely seated before ECU Chancellor Steve Ballard again sounded the at-risk alarm last week.

“The risks to Brody have never been greater than they are today because of a thousand decisions that have been made over the years that have a cumulative effect,” Ballard told members of the Greenville-Pitt County Chamber of Commerce.

Sounding the alarm before a large gathering of area business leaders makes good sense. But are those leaders making sense of what is actually at stake for the medical school? Do they have the sense that the medical school actually is in real danger of closing?

The concerns expressed by Ballard last week have not changed from what was being said last year: Brody’s funding resources have been greatly diminished by state-controlled changes, mostly in the way the medical school is paid for clinical services it provides through its medical practice, ECU Physicians. Medicaid reimbursements have been reduced and the school’s ability to collect payments for services has been restricted by the state’s Setoff Debt Collection Act.

Ballard provides the bottom line on the funding situation by stating that state funding for Brody’s annual operating budget has gone from 53 percent in 1990 to 21 percent today. He said the university needs a minimum contribution of 35-40 percent to run a medical school with Brody’s mission.

Ballard and others have done a good job of explaining the medical school’s massive contribution to eastern North Carolina’s economy and quality of health care. To understand the threat the school is under, citizens need to see the threat with greater clarity. We need to understand the political forces behind the threat, and we need to see a timetable for how long the school can reasonably survive without a reversal of fortune.

The medical school was not established without a long, hard fight. In the school’s 1981 charter class yearbook, the medical school’s first dean, Wallace R. Wooles, wrote that the school “was literally won one year at a time, constantly opposed by organized medicine, organized medical education, and the political structure of the state.”

Who is willing to stand by and watch the same negative forces now dismantle the school, one year at a time?

January 25, 2015 at 2:58 pm
Richard Bunce says:

Live by the sword, die by the sword.

January 26, 2015 at 7:32 am
Barbara Lee says:

Brody is spelled wrong in title7