From South Carolina, helicopters airlift burn victims across the border to Augusta. By plane, more patients arrive from Mississippi, Alabama and beyond. Then, inside the largest burn center in the nation, teams of surgeons and nurses go to work.
Augusta’s Joseph M. Still Burn Center at Doctors Hospital isn’t just the nation’s largest burn unit; it’s also the hub of a network of burn centers that once stretched from Las Vegas to North Charleston. At its height, this network handled more than 20 percent of the country’s most severe burn cases.
The network’s flagship in Augusta admits more than 3,000 badly burned people a year from dozens of states. It achieved this volume in part because it forged a reputation as a national backstop, a burn center in a medium-sized Southern city that took patients that other hospitals turned away.
But a deeper look by The Post and Courier reveals a competing portrait, a tale of ambition, deception and greed. This portrait involves sky-high medical charges, power struggles and alleged coverups. It’s about the rise of a nationally important medical institution in an unlikely city, and then its free-fall after the sudden death in 2020 of Fred Mullins, its driving force.
It also highlights yet another failure in our medical system, where price transparency often is a mirage. In the burn center’s case, a loophole in state workers compensation laws give Georgia hospitals free rein to charge injured South Carolinians staggering sums. One example: A burned worker from the Spartanburg area has medical bills upwards of $30 million.
The burn center’s impacts ripple across the country. Its high charges add pressure on insurers, who pass costs on to employers and ultimately consumers. Critics say it grew in part by steering patients away from closer units, including the Medical University of South Carolina’s burn center in Charleston.