By Josh Beavers
Twenty-five years ago I was the editor of the Press-Herald, and I spent a lot of time at Minden Medical Center. George French, Sarah Haynes, and Mrs. Dawn would show me whatever the hospital had going on, and I’d write it up for the paper. One time I scrubbed in and stood in the operating room while Dr. Timothy Talbert performed a back surgery that was cutting edge at the time. The stories were glowing, and I don’t remember having to stretch the truth to write them.
MMC was named one of the nation’’s 100 Top Hospitals in 2003, 2009 and 2011. It had good people and the money to take care of patients the right way.
None of us knew how good we had it. I grew up in the 80s and 90s, when it seemed like the economy only went one direction and every year would be a little better than the last. I assumed good jobs and a decent life would always be around here, and the hospital was part of that. I said as much in more than one story. I never asked who owned the place or what would happen if somebody else bought it.
In 2018, Allegiance Health Management bought MMC from LifePoint. The announcement promised employees would keep their jobs and every service would stay. I read about it and moved on. I doubt I was the only one, but I’d spent enough years in newspapers to know better than to take a press release at face value.
This spring, the Journal reported that a Shreveport contractor had sued the hospital for more than $170,000, including the bill for an air conditioning chiller installed in September 2025. Two nurse staffing agencies filed claims in January totaling more than $700,000. The hospital also had to pay off about $120,000 in city utility bills that had reportedly gone 90 days unpaid. The Board of Governors said it had asked Allegiance for routine financial information and been refused.
On Sept. 25, six board members resigned, including chairman Dr. Melissa Madden. They said staying on could be seen as a stamp of approval for decisions made at Allegiance’s corporate office. Their statement praised the hospital’s employees and local management and put the problem at the corporate level.
Then the Journal published a text message from someone who works there. According to that message, the hospital had run out of toilet paper and cleaning wipes. The ER’s sharps containers, where used needles go, had been overflowing, and the writer had heard there were no more replacements. They said they could do without some things but had to speak up when safety was involved.
KLFY reported last year that at least six of Allegiance’s eleven hospitals had liens for unpaid payroll taxes, totaling at least $50 million statewide. MMC’s CEO has pointed to rising costs and Medicaid rates that for years paid less than it cost to treat patients. None of that explains why the hospital’s own board was refused routine financial information.
In my opinion, what’s been reported points to greed. A company that won’t open its books to its own board while the staff runs short on supplies is putting money ahead of patients.
MMC says it employs 580 people, 223 of whom live in Minden, with a payroll of around $29 million a year.
When factories shut down across the country in the 2000s, economists expected laid-off workers to move to wherever the jobs were, but most of them stayed put. A lot of them ended up in lower-paying jobs or quit looking for work, and their towns were still dealing with lower home values and higher poverty years later. Another study tracked workers who lost jobs in mass layoffs and found their death rates were 15 to 20 percent higher over the next 20 years.
My wife and I could leave if it came to that. I’m nearly 50, and we’ve been careful with our money for a long time. We both have retirement put back. One of our daughters is soon starting her career, and the other will graduate in a blink. If Minden lost its hospital, we’d have options. I hope we never use them.
Plenty of people in this parish don’t have those options. They’ve got mortgages and kids in school, or they’re on a fixed income and can’t make the drive to Shreveport for every appointment, and they’re the people that research describes. People can leave, but what happens to what they leave behind?
North Louisiana has watched mills and plants shut down before. Losing a hospital hurts differently because nobody gets to decide whether they’ll need one. You don’t pick the ER you end up in after a wreck on I-20 or when your child can’t breathe in the middle of the night. One national analysis puts about a third of the country’s rural hospitals at risk of closing right now. As of last year, Louisiana hadn’t lost one.
Before I started teaching, I published two newspapers and ran a print shop. I’m not a businessman anymore. I’m an idealist, and I don’t know what it would take to save a hospital. I don’t know what it would cost or whether Allegiance would even sell.
This town has doctors who built their careers here and families who have given to every cause Minden ever asked them to. If there’s any way to bring the hospital back under local ownership, whether that’s our physicians buying in or the community raising money, I hope somebody who understands that kind of deal will try. I’d buy in with whatever I could afford.
The people working at MMC right now are doing the same work I used to write about, with fewer supplies and less support from the company that owns the building. I want to save Minden Medical Center. If anybody out there knows how, I’d like to hear it.
Josh Beavers is an award-winning columnist who earned four Best Columnist awards from the Louisiana Press Association. He traded the newsroom for the classroom in 2013, convinced that teaching young people to write, to think, and to become productive members of their community was the more important work.