By Mark Starling
New State Orders Begin This Evening
(Raleigh, NC) North Carolina is entering a modified stay-at-home order beginning at five this afternoon. Most businesses will be required to close by 10 p.m., while alcohol sales by-the-drink will end at nine each night. Residents are also being advised to remain under curfew between 10 p.m. and 5 a.m. Another 55-hundred new COVID-19 cases were reported by state public health officials yesterday.
WNC To Received Thousands Of COVID-19 Vaccine Doses
(Asheville, NC) Several thousand initial doses of Pfizer s COVID-19 vaccine are coming to western North Carolina. Mission Health is expected to receive close to three-thousand, while the rest are going to Pardee Hospital in Hendersonville. A Health and Human Services spokesperson told the Citizen-Times that nearly 86-thousand doses in total are being shipped to the state next week.
Nonprofit Mission Made Lots of Profits Especially for Bosses
By Peter H. Lewis and Barbara Durr,
Asheville Watchdog
For a hospital system organized as a not-for-profit charity, Mission Health made a lot of profits.
The money left over after Asheville-based Mission subtracted its expenses from its revenue what would be called profit at a for-profit hospital grew year after year, right up to 2018, when Mission’s directors surprised nearly everyone by announcing plans to sell out to Tennessee-based HCA Healthcare, the nation’s biggest chain of for-profit hospitals.
Mission at the time was as strong financially as it had ever been, which Mission’s executives said made it the perfect time to sell. They cited trends and studies suggesting that the Mission system faced a bleak future of relentless cost-cutting.