Hospital gets USDA help.

Just one year after breaking ground, the first hospital in Mississippi funded entirely through a direct loan from the U.S. Department of Agriculture will open in the next several weeks, officials said.

Thirty-bed Newton (Miss.) Regional Hospital replaces an aging facility about two miles to the south that was built in 1952 with funds provided under the Hill-Burton act, the national hospital-construction program that built or modernized about 6,000 U.S. facilities.

"We definitely got this done quickly--it was a very aggressive construction schedule," said Timothy Thomas, the hospital's administrator since 1998.

Like most new hospitals, the $7 million replacement facility features all private rooms with an extra allotment of space for outpatient services. At 56,000 square feet, the one-story facility in the rural community in central Mississippi is about one-third larger than the existing hospital. Designing hospitals with only private rooms has been the trend for many years, even in rural communities and for small hospitals, Thomas said.

When officials decided about four years ago on a replacement facility, they initially sought a loan from the U.S. Housing and Urban Development Department, which has guaranteed hundreds of hospital mortgages worth nearly $10 billion over the past several decades through the Federal Housing Administration's Section 242 Hospital Mortgage Insurance Program.

Instead, Thomas and others learned about a long-term, direct-loan program sponsored by the USDA, which reduced debt service by nearly $20,000 per month compared with the HUD plan. The HUD program also limits loans to 90% of the hospital's total value. The USDA funded the entire cost of the replacement hospital over 40 years, or 15 more than under HUD's program, officials said.

Thomas said the goal is to dedicate the new hospital in mid-September and move patients and equipment over sometime in the first two weeks of October.

In 2003, when Newton's loan was approved, the USDA provided about $169 million for all healthcare projects across the nation, including hospitals, assisted-living centers and pharmacies. Only about three hospitals were completely funded through the plan that year. Last year, that figure rose to about $306 million, with more than $71 million going to 20 general and surgical hospital projects, according to the USDA.

PHOTO (COLOR): Newton Regional Hospital is a 56,000-square-foot facility that replaces a hospital built in the 1950s under the Hill-Burton act.

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By Michael Romano