How they cheered the news at Waterbury Hospital in November when UConn Health Board of Directors Chair John Driscoll declared, “We have finally reached a point where we are going to invest in people over profits. Goodbye Prospect.”
Two weeks later, a special session of the legislature voted to authorize $390 million in bonds for UConn to purchase Waterbury, Bristol, and Day Kimball hospitals.
Prospect is the bankrupt Prospect Medical Holdings. It purchased Waterbury Hospital, Manchester Memorial Hospital, and Rockville Hospital in 2016. The owners of Prospect set about running those three hospitals and ignoring the conditions of their purchase while state regulators paid no attention.
Prospect left a trail of wreckage exceeding anything the state’s healthcare industry had ever endured. We will pay a price for the failure of state regulators to make Prospect honor the commitments it made to get its purchase of the three hospitals approved a decade ago. The same regulators failed to pay attention when Prospect sold hospital assets and paid themselves the proceeds, leaving the hospitals finances increasingly precarious.
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Yale New Haven Health withdrew from a 2022 deal to buy the three Prospect hospitals when it discovered the state of those hospitals’ finances. Hartford Healthcare relieved some of the hospital crisis and bought Manchester and Rockville hospitals from the bankrupt Prospect. No one wanted Waterbury Hospital.
Dire finances and quality of care concerns caused the state’s Department of Public Health to monitor the Prospect hospitals while they lingered in bankruptcy. Prospect owed tens of millions of dollars in local property taxes and more than $120 million to the state for unpaid provider taxes. The failure to pay provider taxes caused the state to lose millions in federal funds.
The state paid $13 million in cash for Waterbury and assumed $22 million in liabilities. It estimates it will have to spend tens of millions to upgrade the hospital. The state “agreed to substantially all employees of Prospect Waterbury [being] extended offers of employment to continue their roles” at the hospital, according to UConn Health Information Officer Jennifer Walker.
From their own online descriptions, some of the Waterbury Prospect executives now at UConn had positions with responsibilities beyond Waterbury. EJay Lockwood was a Prospect Senior Vice President of Coordinated Regional Care for Pennsylvania and Connecticut from 2019 until February of this year. Today, he is Vice President of Managed Care at UConn Health.
Dave Pierpont was Prospect’s Executive Director of Market Development for nine years. He’s now UConn Health’s Senior Vice President of Staff Operations at Waterbury Hospital. Pierpont’s LinkedIn profile describes him as a “transformative leader.” He certainly was an executive of a company that transformed three Connecticut hospitals into being on life support.
Deborah Weymouth was the CEO of ECHN, the entity that owned Manchester and Rockville hospital, for more than six years, from September 2019 to January 2026. In 2024, Weymouth became president and CEO of Prospect Connecticut, adding Waterbury Hospital to her portfolio. Today, Weymouth continues to serve as the head of beleaguered Waterbury Hospital under UConn Health. On her LinkedIn profile, Weymouth describes herself also as a “transformation leader” and an “expert in turnarounds and crisis recovery.”
None of the three mentions putting people over profits as a talent or a virtue they possess.
Fantasy continues to play an ominous role in the creation of the new UConn hospital network. Lamont said the four-hospital network that he has created will “grow UConn health as an international hub of excellence and opportunities across the state.” None of the four hospitals that will constitute the UConn Health network has a Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services overall rating of more than three stars of five. Bristol Hospital, the next to be purchased, has a two-star overall rating.
UConn Health will go from a single hospital burden on the state to four draining the state’s finances while they try to poach patients from hospitals that have been able to sustain themselves in a competitive industry. The state will begin to try to boost the number of patients in the UConn Health system by moving state employees and retirees and their families from the doctors and hospitals they use now to the UConn Health system.
Candor can cause dismay in the UConn Health executive suite. This week saw an example of some missing details in its self-promotion that ought to be highlighted. The Leapfrog Group released its semiannual hospital safety ratings and UConn Health for the 11th straight time received the group’s top, five-star rating.
Leapfrog has had a hard year. In March, a federal district court judge in Florida ruled that Leapfrog engages in “deceptive and unfair” practices that violate state law. Judge Donald M. Middlebrooks found at the conclusion of a trial that Leapfrog penalized hospitals that declined to submit data to it and “misrepresents hospital safety.”
The judge criticized Leapfrog’s “pay to play” scheme. A hospital that wants to highlight its Leapfrog rating must pay a license fee to use the Leapfrog symbol in its materials and signage. UConn Health this year is paying $16,900 to use the Leapfrog logo to promote its rating. In 2024, Leapfrog made $3.2 million from its licensing deal. The non-profit pays its founder and CEO, Leah Binder, $669,000 that year, the most recent for which public records are available.
Leapfrog gave Bristol and Waterbury hospitals a C for safety. Day Kimball, also soon to be a UConn Health hospital, received a D grade. UConn Health will likely not be highlighting those grades as it continues to insist combining three distressed hospitals with one that’s been losing money for decades into a state-owned system is a good idea.
Kevin F. Rennie can be reached at kfrennie@yahoo.com