Southwest Memorial Hospital in Cortez has been honored nationally, even as it faces financial struggles that are being shared by many hospitals across the state and nation.
Southwest Health System CEO Joe Theine gave an update to the Montezuma County commissioners at their workshop Monday.
He noted that Becker’s Hospital Review recently named Southwest Memorial among its top 100 critical access hospitals for 2026, its top 100 great community hospitals, and its top hospitals for nurse communication.
“There is a tremendous amount of good work being noticed nationally at Southwest Health,” Theine said.
Becker’s list of Great Community Hospitals celebrates “the institutions that bring accessible, affordable, high-quality care to patients beyond the reach of large urban health systems,” according to information online.
In selecting the institutions, Becker’s editorial team relied on nominations and information from “respected evaluators like U.S. News & World Report, Healthgrades, CMS, The Leapfrog Group, the National Rural Health Association and the Chartis Center for Rural Health,” its website says.
It praised Southwest Health System, which operates Southwest Memorial and other clinics locally, for building its success “on three strategic pillars, including physician recruitment, financial sustainability and operational efficiency.”
However, in the first four months of this year, Theine told the commissioners, Southwest Health has sustained a loss of about $1.5 million from operations, mostly because fewer people are seeking care. This comes after two years of positive operating margins for SHS
Theine said data at the end of 2024 shows that about 85 percent of rural hospitals statewide have reached a point where they are not financially sustainable.
He said Mercy and Animas Surgical hospitals in Durango are both seeing some of their worst financial years in a long time.
General concern about the economy seems to be the main cause, Theine said.
Consumers are increasing their debt, interest rates remain high, and the cost of living is going up in general, he said, so at the beginning of this year, when deductibles reset, people likely began looking at health care as one place where they could spend less money, not getting care that isn’t urgent.
Meanwhile, the number of uninsured patients receiving charity care and of people applying for low-cost charity programs at SHS is increasing.
“This is not unique to us,” Theine said, “but it does present the challenge of having less revenues when most of the costs of running a hospital are fixed.”
Theine praised Colorado senators John Hickenlooper and Michael Bennet, as well as Third District Rep. Jeff Hurd, for supporting congressionally directed spending that was included in this year’s appropriations package. He said funds from that should help SHS replace or upgrade CT, nuclear medicine, and X-ray equipment.
He said an estimate done pro bono by an outside group predicts that, if policies under HR 1 (the so-called Big Beautiful Bill, which was passed by Congress in 2025 and made enormous cuts to Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act), remain in place, SHS can expect a reduction of about $9.6 million in its annual income by the end of 2033.
The impacts of HR 1 won’t really come into play until 2027, after the midterm elections, Theine said.
The Rural Health Transformation Program, which was part of HR 1 and allocates $50 billion nationwide for improving health care in rural communities, will not likely be a big help, Theine said.
“Of the $200 million coming to the state of Colorado,” he told the commissioners, “there’s about $4 million for the whole state dedicated to hospitals. The rest is competitive, with lots of other entities applying.”
In early discussions, state officials suggested they would award only 20 hospitals about $200,000 each, Theine said. “There’s about 45 rural hospitals in the state, so only half the hospitals in the state would be getting about $200,000.
“It’s not a way that’s really going to replace the lost income that we’re already seeing.”
In choosing Southwest Memorial as one of its great community hospitals, Becker’s said online, “The hospital’s leadership team has been a vocal public advocate on rural health policy, warning that proposed Medicaid cuts and challenges to nonprofit tax status could threaten the hospital with losses in the millions, and arguing that the community benefits provided by nonprofit rural hospitals, including charity care, emergency services and mental health programs, far outweigh the cost of their tax exemptions.”
“Changes in future policy are really going to challenge health care and rural health care at large,” Theine told the commissioners Monday.
