SAN MARCOS — Following suit of several counties from West Texas to along the state’s coast, and those in between, Hays County is considering executing a hospital district, but the project is still in the works.
The idea of establishing a hospital district — a taxing entity that captures dollars to help focus on the healthcare of the community in more robust ways — is a fairly recent one. Hays County Judge Ruben Becerra stated that he has been researching this for years, looking at several diverse models from El Paso to Dallas, Abilene, Harris and Travis counties and everywhere in between to fully understand what can be done to best serve the community.
There is an assortment of options on how a hospital district could be conducted in Hays County, Becerra explained, including a mechanism that is basically expanding indigent care all the way up to incorporating an insurance type of program: “There’s different layers and different levels in between and so, what we are working on is getting the details of what will be most useful to our providers right now at this time."
The timing is crucial for a hospital district to come to Hays County as, according to Becerra, there is not enough money being dedicated into the healthcare system and there is an ever-growing shortage of medical professionals not just locally, but across the entire state of Texas.
“I feel that if we support more robustly with [providers], our medical facilities, our doctors’ offices, our cardiologists, etc., that we will have supply and demand, so there will be a stronger support here for it,” he shared. “There will be dollars behind it and so, by default, everyone in the county will have more access to more care.”
Becerra has met with leadership from the local hospital system, including the CEO of the Hill Country Mental Health and Developmental Disabilities Centers, as mental health is a key component of the project, which is something that has received strong support through a public survey that was available for residents to provide their feedback. Additionally, there is strong support for speciality care that includes Alzheimer’s, dementia, cardiology, etc.
In order for the hospital district to be created, the county would go through the process of a petition to garner enough signatures in order for this to be placed on a future election ballot. However, this would happen after the county has all of the input needed from community members, medical leadership and others.
Right now, the county is still in the process of gathering information on how to best serve the Hays County community if a hospital district were to be established.
“We're in the stage of meeting with the professionals [and] meeting with the support team because the last thing I want to do is create the impression that we want to make winners and losers in our medical system or that we want to build [medical facilities] to serve our community. It's quite the opposite,” Becerra said. “We want to work with everyone that is here [in Hays County] and support them financially [and to] provide a more robust level of care for our community.”
In order to provide updates to the community, Becerra said that he is exploring the idea of creating a landing page that will house information on the hospital district project in the future.
