Dr. Jack Leary (Provided photo — Kathleen Moore, The Post-Star)

GLENS FALLS — A retired Glens Falls Hospital doctor is trying to rally the community to save the hospital.

Dr. Jack Leary, who was the president of the medical staff and an anesthesiologist, pediatrician and emergency medicine doctor, retired last year after decades of working at the hospital.

He wants the hospital to apply for Sole Community Hospital designation, which would bring in significant federal aid. The hospital will not easily qualify because the general requirement is that the hospital be 25 miles from the next hospital. Glens Falls Hospital is 19 miles from Saratoga Hospital, a distance of about 30 minutes.

So he is asking for the community to write letters of support, detailing why they need a hospital and why Saratoga Hospital is too far away. He also wants to get support from U.S. Rep. Elise Stefanik, R-Schuylerville, who has previously said she wants to help the hospital get that designation.

Hospital officials said they welcomed the help.

“For Glens Falls Hospital, the Sole Community Hospital designation would require a federal exception. We are grateful for the support from our community to continue to advance the issue,” hospital Vice President Tracy Mills said.

Stefanik spokeswoman Maddie Anderson said Stefanik is working on it at the federal level as well and is corresponding with the hospital on the issue.

Leary, 75, who lives in Moreau, thinks the Sole Community Hospital designation is crucial.

He has spoken with members of the board of trustees and the hospital foundation to urge someone to ask for letters of support, but no one has stepped forward to take the lead on the effort.

Now he is taking charge.

“I want the hospital to succeed. I believe it’s an absolute necessity to the region,” Leary said. “I’m trying to figure out a way to solve the problem.”

Those who want to join the effort to get Sole Community Hospital designation can email him at jackleary@yahoo.com.

There is a way to get the designation despite how near Saratoga Hospital is: If he can prove that on at least 30 days in a year, two out of three years, it would take 45 minutes to get from Glens Falls Hospital to Saratoga Hospital, the hospital would qualify for the designation.

That might require someone crunching numbers to determine the number of days with major car accidents on the southbound side of the Northway, as well as blizzards, ice storms and the like.

Instead, Leary would rather have Stefanik argue that the hospital is a truly regional hospital that draws many patients from the north, far from Saratoga Hospital.

“Sure, from the hospital itself it’s 19 miles. But what is it from the true center of gravity?” he said, adding that for many patients the drive would be more than an hour to Saratoga Hospital.

“And certainly if you were coming from Whitehall clinic or any of those (hospital) clinics,” he said.

He is dismayed by the changes at what was once a cutting-edge hospital where Albany Medical Center surgeons came to see laproscopies before performing them in Albany.

“We were the first ER in the area with full-time physicians. The first day surgery (in the region) was at Glens Falls Hospital. We were two months ahead of Syracuse. We did laproscopic first,” he said. “Glens Falls Hospital was really progressive.”

But in his last years there, the hospital lost millions of dollars in a billing software problem, and it doesn’t seem to have recovered. Recently, hospital officials announced they would close all of their outpatient mental health programs, known as behavioral health.

“When I was working in the ER, you know what was always the busiest unit? Behavioral health,” Leary said.

While he is deeply saddened by the cuts, he said the hospital’s finances have likely forced it to reduce costs. The last report he saw, in December, was not encouraging.

“In basic terms, they were in the red and the trend was going down,” he said.

If the hospital was named a Sole Community Hospital, it would get an immediate 7.1 percent increase in Medicare reimbursements, increased funding from the state for Medicaid patients, and discounts on buying drugs for outpatients.

The 340B Drug Pricing Program allows patients without insurance to buy prescriptions at a deeply discounted rate. Those with insurance buy their prescriptions as normal, but the hospital gets to keep the difference between what the insurance paid and the discounted price.

The program applies only to outpatient drugs. But some very expensive cancer-treating prescriptions would qualify, as would almost all drugs prescribed at the hospital’s 10 medical centers.

Hudson Headwaters Health Network is in the program and received $17 million through it last year.

“Now, they’ve got clinics in Glens Falls,” Leary said. “The original premise was they needed the drug discount for rural medicine. Why isn’t the hospital in the same program? I don’t begrudge Hudson Headwaters. To me it’s just logic. They need it. We need it, too.”