Baptist Health South Florida has announced that it is considering taking over operations at Fishermen's Hospital in Marathon -- a move that would give it control of two of the three hospitals in the Florida Keys and expand its geographic dominance in the southernmost area of the state.

The Baptist system already owns Mariners Hospital in Key Largo. The only other hospitals south of North Kendall Drive that are not owned by Baptist are Jackson South in southern Miami-Dade County and the Lower Keys Medical Center in Key West.

Fishermen's, which has about 140 employees, is a community-owned nonprofit institution leased to the for-profit Health Management Associates, which also operates the Key West hospital. HMA, based in Naples, has a contract to run Fishermen's through June 2010.

Baptist Health and Fishermen's chairman of the board, Marv Schindler, refused to reveal terms of the agreement or a possible timetable. HMA did not respond to a request for comment.

Discussions among leaders of Fishermen's, HMA and Baptist have been going on for months.

LOST STATUS

Schindler said he didn't want to discuss his opinion of the performance of HMA, which has leased the hospital since 1986, but in August, the hospital lost its tax-exempt status from the Internal Revenue Service because a for-profit entity was running it.

Because of that, Schindler said, federal authorities told the hospital it could not apply for a special designation by Medicare as a rural hospital, which would have qualified Fishermen's for larger Medicare payments.

In a news release issued Tuesday, Baptist, which is a nonprofit, said the deal was ``subject to the satisfactory completion of Baptist Health's due diligence and the satisfaction of certain other conditions.''

LOW OCCUPANCY RATE

According to state data, the occupancy rate for the 58 licensed beds at Fishermen's was a mere 12.6 percent in 2007, with the hospital losing $626,000 on $20.2 million in revenue. About 60 percent of its patient-days were paid for by the government, primarily Medicare and Medicaid. The uninsured accounted for 12.5 percent. Private insurance made up 20 percent.

Schindler said that Baptist's policy of offering financial help to uninsured people who earn less than three times the federal poverty level would be a great help to many in the Keys.

''I'm just tremendously confident that this will go well,'' said Schindler of the proposed deal.

Baptist Health, the largest private employer in South Florida, also operates Baptist, Homestead, South Miami and Doctors hospitals.

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