{"id":313690,"date":"2025-10-18T15:12:10","date_gmt":"2025-10-18T15:12:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/313690\/"},"modified":"2025-10-18T15:12:10","modified_gmt":"2025-10-18T15:12:10","slug":"cts-400m-catastrophe-it-was-not-inevitable","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/313690\/","title":{"rendered":"CT’s $400M catastrophe. It was not inevitable"},"content":{"rendered":"

In a world of uncertainties, our state\u2019s governors can count on one constant: the relentless burden of the University of Connecticut Health Center.<\/a><\/p>\n

The Farmington hospital<\/a> has been losing vast amounts of money for decades. Gov. Ned Lamont, our first governor with a graduate degree in business, has spent years trying without success to get a large hospital network to takeover UConn Health.<\/p>\n

A new, novel, and bad idea continues to gain momentum: purchase three money losing hospitals<\/a> with UConn Health. Abracadabra, four hospitals that cannot on make money on their own will together begin to spin out profits with a $400 million investment from the public. The three hospitals,<\/a> Bristol, Day Kimball in Putnam, and Waterbury are in a variety of dire straits. Waterbury, one of three hospitals owned by Prospect Medical Holdings, is under the jurisdiction of a Texas bankruptcy court.<\/p>\n

Hartford Hospital\u2019s healthcare network has submitted a bid<\/a> to purchase Prospect\u2019s other two hospitals, Manchester Memorial and Rockville, expanding its presence in greater Hartford.<\/p>\n

\n

Hartford HealthCare seeks to buy Manchester and Rockville hospitals. Documents show $86M offer<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Connecticut communities have strong bonds with their local hospitals. Often, they are the largest employer and active in civic life. Most community hospitals have struggled to compete with large health networks. As medicine advances, so does the cost of more sophisticated equipment and the people to run it.<\/p>\n

Connecticut has a lot of hospitals for a state its size. No one wants to say we have too many hospitals and name the ones that should close or be downgraded to offering limited services. Instead, our hospital system lurches when resistance to changes becomes too impractical or expensive. Hartford and Yale New Haven Health have absorbed failing hospitals. Neither has been willing to near the burden of owning UConn Health.<\/p>\n

A consultant\u2019s report concluded last year<\/a> concluded that \u201cUConn Health has generated sizeable losses over the past four years.\u201d UConn Health\u2019s future looks more difficult because \u201cit is unable to generate cash flow to independently support growth initiatives\u201d and \u201cto support the capital needs of the organization.\u201d Soldering three hospitals onto UConn Health, institutions in even worse financial condition than UConn, adds more costs to our expensive health care system.<\/p>\n

Medical services that were only available in hospitals are now provided in satellite facilities, often in suburbs away from the hospital mother ship. UConn has been trying to adopt that model, which inevitably continues the migration away from the main hospital to the less expensive to operate satellites.<\/p>\n

No one wants to be on the scene of a traumatic hospital closure, especially within a year of an election for governor. Monday was the centenary of the birth of one of freedom\u2019s greatest champions, Margaret Thatcher. Her official biographer, Charles Moore, remarked Thursday at a forum on her life, she understood the precariousness of politics. \u201cYou need a sort of cunning about when to do things.\u201d Lamont shares that knowledge from some harrowing campaigns he was on course to win and then suddenly was not. Three hospital closings would endanger the genial governor\u2019s reputation for competence.<\/p>\n

As has become his custom, state Comptroller Sean Scanlon accepted the poisoned chalice from Lamont and undertook the task of trying to figure out how to save four distressed hospitals. In many states, a lieutenant governor committed to performing a heavy lift of complicated public policy would want a challenging assignment. Connecticut does not have such a lieutenant governor, so Scanlon has become the reliable substitute. Lamont is not the only official who appreciates Scanlon\u2019s willingness to immerse himself in complicated problems.<\/p>\n

Some version close to Scanlon\u2019s solution will advance. The state will be burdened with hundreds of millions of dollars in more debt now and far more in the future. The state\u2019s power will be used to take patients from hospitals that are better run than the four that would comprise the new UConn system.<\/p>\n

The thousands of employees at Bristol, Day Kimball, and Waterbury, Scanlon insists, would not become state employees. Instead, they would be employed by UConn\u2019s Finance Corporation, \u201ca service organization for UConn Health [that provides] contracting, real estate facilities, and pharmaceutical sales to UConn Health.\u201d<\/p>\n

State employee unions, through their political influence or by asserting the provisions of labor practices would eventually find a way to have the employees of the three purchased hospitals become full state employees with all the costs that come with it. But that is not likely to happen until after next year\u2019s election.<\/p>\n

There is an opportunity among these troubles. The state could, as I\u2019ve suggested before, address our serious shortage of mental health and addiction beds by converting one of the hospitals into a behavioral health hospital.<\/p>\n

One change is essential. The catastrophe that accompanied Prospect\u2019s purchase and mismanagement of three hospitals could have been mitigated and maybe prevented if the state\u2019s health care regulators paid attention and asserted their authority. The owners of Prospect took the hospitals\u2019 assets. State regulators seemed to pay no attention as the hospital buildings were sold and proceeds distributed, not invested in maintaining 21st century facilities.<\/p>\n

Years of back taxes seemed to attract no concern from state agencies that oversee health care in Connecticut. The implosion of three hospitals was not inevitable. It could have been prevented for far less than the $400 million starting price and the blank check that accompanies it.<\/p>\n

Reach Kevin F. Rennie at kfrennie@yahoo.com<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In a world of uncertainties, our state\u2019s governors can count on one constant: the relentless burden of the…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":313691,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[31271,2738,13332,51254,157985,26448,73926,157983,210,1141,1142,6478,3584,3861,157982,517,816,33899,157986,157987,157981,67,132,68,157984,640,54395,9324,3247,152418],"class_list":{"0":"post-313690","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-health-care","8":"tag-bonding","9":"tag-connecticut","10":"tag-cost","11":"tag-ct","12":"tag-day-kimball","13":"tag-debt","14":"tag-farmington","15":"tag-hartford-healthcare","16":"tag-health","17":"tag-health-care","18":"tag-healthcare","19":"tag-hospital","20":"tag-hospitals","21":"tag-how","22":"tag-lamont","23":"tag-mental-health","24":"tag-payments","25":"tag-prospect","26":"tag-scanlon","27":"tag-state-health-care-regulators","28":"tag-uconn-health","29":"tag-united-states","30":"tag-unitedstates","31":"tag-us","32":"tag-waterbury","33":"tag-what","34":"tag-where","35":"tag-who","36":"tag-why","37":"tag-yale-new-haven"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115395817903580533","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/313690","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=313690"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/313690\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/313691"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=313690"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=313690"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=313690"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}