From the Editor: Winning some, losing some in Morgan City

As St. Mary struggles to find a new place in a changing economy, we’re bound to lose some and win some.
Morgan City experienced both in the last couple of weeks.
The city lost Charlie’s Lanes, the bowling alley that closed its doors Sept. 28. But Morgan City, and the whole parish stand to benefit because Ochsner Health System is now running Teche Regional Medical Center. The hospital has been renamed Ochsner St. Mary.
We’ve seen business come and, too often, go over the course of these last four rocky years. But the closure of Charlie’s Lanes pulled a little harder at the heartstrings for many people.
The bowling alley was an example of two things that all small towns crave and prize.
It was something to do that didn’t require an hour’s drive in one direction or another. And bowling is a pastime for working people, which matches the character of the people here.
You rent some shoes, bowl a couple of lines and have a couple of beers. That, friends, is an All-American night out.
The other thing Charlie’s Lanes represented is something to do for young people. Activities like that always seems to be in short supply, activities that don’t involve video games, badly planned romantic adventures or something you buy in a sandwich bag.
Charlie’s was home field for bowling teams at Morgan City, Central Catholic and Berwick High schools. And the lanes hosted recent Special Olympics bowling competitions.
“Losing the bowling alley for the youth is what bothers me the most,” owner Charlie Bergeron told The Daily Review reporter Jaclyn Breaux. “For those that can’t play baseball, football, basketball, whatever, they can bowl.
“We had a lot of youth that wanted to bowl. We also had Special Olympics coming in October. We are hoping, for the youth, that someone might walk in tomorrow and want to keep the bowling center.”
The decision to close was hard for Bergeron but “you can’t keep putting good money to bad. That’s what I decided because I did put good money to bad, and I can’t do it anymore.”
So the curtain has come down for now on bowling in Morgan City, which has a history going back at least as far as 1875.
It wasn’t that long ago that some local people feared that Teche Regional might go the same way.
Over the last couple of years, there was a lawsuit when a Hospital Service District No. 2 board member tried to get a seat on Teche Regional’s internal board. Longtime management company LifePoint Health announced it was moving out of Louisiana after what appears to have been years of losses totaling in the millions.
Hospital staff members expressed anxiety over the closed-door deliberations on finding a replacement for LifePoint. The district board’s attorney resigned out of dissatisfaction with other aspects of the search.
St. Mary Parish Hospital District No. 2, which owns the hospital, settled on three potential replacements, and only one of them proved viable. It was Ochsner, which, aside from being an economic force in Louisiana, has a record of making small hospitals perform financially.
Rural hospitals are under a lot of economic pressure, partly because the areas they serve are under economic pressure. As jobs become more scarce in rural areas, the proportion of patients who can write a check for their care or have good insurance shrinks, and the number of patients who rely on government health care programs or can’t afford to pay at all grows.
St. Mary’s experience over the last four years is no exception.
The University of North Carolina has counted 113 rural hospitals that have closed since 2010.
But Ochsner has a network of hospitals across the state, and the network is growing with the company’s recently announced merger with Lafayette General Medical Center, one of the two big player’s in that city’s growing health care market.
If a patient has a problem that Teche Regional — now Ochsner St. Mary — lacks the knowhow to handle, doctors can call on colleagues at other Ochsner hospitals.
Ochsner is also promising to invest in the Morgan City hospital and implement an electronic medical records system that will give patients access to more information about their care. As this is written, I’ve just received three text alerts about a doctor’s appointment I didn’t make, so more information sounds pretty good.
Making Ochsner the operator of the local hospital may have been the most positive outcome St. Mary could have hoped for. And it happened at a time when the parish needs good outcomes.
Bill Decker is the managing editor of The Daily Review.