Jimmy Carter: A global leader, a local hospital supporter

Ariel Hart, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution on Jan 4, 2025

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ATLANTA — Jimmy Carter’s casket departed from the community hospital that he helped build.

National and global health leaders overflowed with praise this week for the public health accomplishments of the former president, whose programs have saved and restored tens of millions of lives worldwide, and broadened the public understanding of hospice care. Carter died Dec. 29 at the age of 100.

But he acted on the local level, too, in a very important way. Not only was he the first U.S. president born in a hospital, the Wise Sanitarium in Plains, but decades later he helped to save quality hospital services for a rural hub near his home in Plains.

In 2007, century-old Sumter County Regional Hospital in Americus was destroyed by a tornado. No law said it had to be fully replaced. Rural hospitals were closing nationwide, or closing services like labor and delivery. At the time, a wave of such closures in Georgia was just beginning. In Americus, FEMA provided a makeshift temporary hospital of metal-sided compartments in the parking lot of a strip mall.

The prognosis for success wasn’t certain. The congressional district in which the hospital lies is one of the poorest in the nation, a hospital leader said. Unfortunately, hospitals depend for financial stability on having privately insured locals in their community who are willing to stay in the area when they need expensive treatment, rather than traveling to a big city.

But at the end of 2011, the brand-new Phoebe Sumter Medical Center, funded in part by the Albany-based Phoebe Putney Health System, opened its doors at a spacious location about 3 miles away. It has twice won a national contest as the nation’s most beautiful hospital. It attracts more than twice as many patients as the old hospital used to. All 76 of its beds were full on Thursday when hospital CEO Carlyle Walton spoke to an Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporter.

Jimmy Carter was an important part of making that happen, said Walton and Joel Wernick, the former CEO of the Phoebe Putney Health System.

Carter helped advocate for FEMA money to help build the new hospital. He knew Phoebe Putney would make the operating decisions, so he met with Wernick.

Sitting in his living room in Plains, Carter explained his own skin in the game: His mother was a nurse. His father and members of his family had always been on the board of the local “sanitarium,” the old name for hospitals.

He asked for “granular” detail, Wernick said, to make sure Phoebe’s vision for the hospital was going to provide robust services for the community including labor and delivery.

In return, Carter showed up, and met the cameras. Groundbreakings, ribbon cuttings, and later on for his own health care.

That “absolutely” buoyed confidence in the product, Wernick said. That went both for consumers Phoebe was trying to attract and maybe something even tougher: doctors reluctant to work a rural area.

“When you saw him at a ribbon cutting, when you saw him wherever,” it meant something, Wernick said. “In the old days, when somebody across the church pew would say, ‘Well, I heard your aunt had cardiac or cancer problems, where are they going?’ It used to be they were going to Atlanta. They were going to Birmingham, they were going somewhere else.

“Our whole goal was that when somebody said, ‘Where are they going?’ they were going to Phoebe Sumter.”

Partly because of Carter, that strategy panned out, Werner said. It worked with doctors, too. Phoebe Putney invested in a labor and delivery unit for Phoebe Sumter and it got staffed.

“Recruiting obstetrical positions to practice in rural areas, no matter where it is, is a challenge in this country,” Wernick said. “That goes back again to confidence. (And) that goes back to the president, I think, either tacitly or intentionally, putting his thumbprint on it so that people knew that it was a place that he certainly was proud of.”

When Carter had brain cancer in 2015, he did the thing presidents and people with money do: He traveled hours away to get cutting-edge treatments. The immunotherapy he received at Emory Healthcare in Atlanta worked, and he apparently never had a relapse, said Carter’s personal physician, Dr. Michael Raines.

For a while, Carter went back and forth to Atlanta to get the regular scans that cancer patients do to check for new growths. But then Carter resumed using Phoebe Sumter.

“President Carter’s focus was to ensure that something less-than was here before would not occur,” said the hospital’s current CEO, Walton. “For him to trust community health care and community providers just enhances the credibility.”

Wernick thinks that though Carter is now gone, his legacy won’t disappear.

“How many hospitals get to have a president — who certainly was a man of the people — be both interested and actually be a user of the facilities?” Wernick said. “People in southwest Georgia will always know that Jimmy Carter was one of their own.”