Sevier County Medical Center opens

By Patrick Massey

Monday was a long-awaited and much-anticipated day for Sevier County with the opening of the region’s newest hospital.

The Sevier County Medical Center officially opened its doors to patients Monday morning, Jan. 23. The cover over the emergency room sign was taken off and the first patients were admitted that day to the brand-new county-owned hospital.

The opening has been delayed on several occasions due to vandalism at the construction site as well as shortages in construction materials, laborers and other issues related to the economic consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The 15-bed Sevier County Medical Center offers a broad range of medical services including general procedures and patient rehab services. In addition, the facility will provide the first 24-hour emergency care unit in Sevier County since the closure of the De Queen Hospital in the spring of 2019.

That year, Sevier County and three employees of the De Queen Hospital filed a lawsuit against the hospital’s owners, Jorge Perez and his brother, Ricardo Perez, both of Miami. The suit alleged financial mismanagement on behalf of the owners.

Jorge Perez also faced claims of fraud in a lawsuit filed by more than a dozen Blue Cross & Blue Shield health insurance plans. In all, Perez closed 10 of the hospitals owned by his company, Empower Group of Florida, in 2019. In April of that year, Perez filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy reorganization for the De Queen Hospital. That request was later dismissed and the hospital was placed into receivership.

The county-owned hospital is overseen by a board of governors with further accountability established through the Sevier County Quorum Court. Construction of the $24 million facility was funded through a one-cent sales tax approved by a vast majority of voters in late 2019.

Last month, the hospital was awarded a $6.25 million federal grant through the American Recovery Plan Act (ARPA) of 2021. Those funds aided in the purchase of equipment and other start-up costs ahead of today’s opening date.

By Richie Lawry

“Hello Americans; this is Paul Harvey. Stand by for news!”

For many years I tried to arrange my workday so that I could be near the radio when Paul Harvey would start his daily newscast with those familiar words. Paul Harvey’s voice and style made him seem like a friend was telling you what had happened that day. His voice is one of the most recognizable in the history of radio. Over 20 million Americans regularly listened to Paul Harvey each week. One thousand six hundred radio stations carried his broadcast.

Paul Harvey was an innovator in the news business. He was a pioneer in the blending of news and opinion. Harvey never tried to hide that his “news” broadcasts included his personal views and conservative bias. While he personalized the radio news with his conservative opinions, he did it in a friendly way with heart-warming tales of average Americans, and folksy observations that made people feel at ease.

In 1945, when he was 27, Harvey began reporting the news on the Chicago radio station WENR. Soon, his broadcasts were topping the ratings in the greater Chicago area. In November 1950, the station debuted the 15-minute “Paul Harvey News & Comments” program. The following year the program was nationally syndicated by the American Broadcasting Company. His distinctive delivery was heard regularly over ABC for almost 60 years until his death in 2009. He was the most listened-to man in broadcasting.

“I have a strong point of view, and I share it with my listeners,” Harvey told the American Journalism Review in 1998. Known for his staunch conservatism, he supported McCarthyism in the 1950s and George Wallace’s segregation in the 1960s. In his later years, Harvey veered to the left by supporting the Equal Rights Amendment and abortion rights and criticizing the Christian right for attempting to impose its views on others.