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Hello, FTC
A
s if Dr. John Murphy did not have enough to worry about on the regulatory front – given who knows how many local, state and federal agencies touching his Western Connecticut Health Network – add another he perhaps did not expect to get to know in taking the job a few years back. Hello, Federal Trade Commission. Earlier in April, Norwalk Hospital and Danbury Hospital floated the idea of an affiliation or outright merger under Western Connecticut Health, which runs both the latter hospital and New Milford Hospital. Any such deal would amount to a spinal fusion of sorts for Fairfield County’s health system, creating a north-south access of health services supported by myriad physicians offices attached to the three hospitals. Any such merger would leave Stamford Hospital standing as the last solo acute-care hospital in Fairfield County, with Bridgeport Hospital and Greenwich Hospital part of Yale New Haven Health System (which now is in the process of acquiring the Hospital of St. Raphael in New Haven), and St.
Vincent’s Medical Center part of Ascension Health. Generally, hospitals have sought such deals in a bid to cut costs by pooling their purchasing power and
Two Illinois hospitals abandoned plans to merge after a federal judge issued an injunction sought by the FTC, which said the deal would limit competition and so raise health-care costs.
paring expenses through shared services. Only this past month, however, two Illinois hospitals abandoned plans to merge after a federal judge issued an injunction sought by the FTC, which said the deal would limit competition and so raise health-care costs.
Greenwich Hospital CEO Frank Corvino acknowledges Yale New Haven had taken a look at Norwalk Hospital in the past with an eye on a combination, as part of its own scouting for expansion opportunities. At St. Vincent’s Medical Center in Bridgeport, meanwhile, Dr. Stuart Marcus is now president, freeing up time for CEO Susan Davis to shuttle between Bridgeport and Florida, where she is helping out an Ascension facility in Jacksonville. Only in March, Ascension announced it would absorb six hospitals in California. The Fairfield County Business Journal scheduled a roundtable on hospitals and health care for April 26, with Western Connecticut Health’s Murphy among the featured panelists. He, Corvino, Davis and others face dizzying questions these days as the Obama administration wheels the gurney of health reform through the federal and state agencies charged with implementing it. We’ve been known to ask some tough questions – but nothing like the FTC’s interrogators.
Left, right – or wrong Nobody is asking tougher questions these days than Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Anthony Kennedy, the key swing votes as the U.S. Supreme Court considers whether to pull the plug on ObamaCare. And no Supreme Court ruling in recent years will do more to answer questions faced by businesses families and the health care industry itself, all trying to work out budgets – in the latter case, with May looming as prime budgeting season for the hospitals for the fiscal years starting each October. For any readers in a full-body cast the past several months and no Internet access, the Supreme Court is expected to release its decision in late June. Either way it goes, it will get your EKG doing calisthenics.
Not that there’s any good answer here. If the Affordable Care Act’s opponents see a future health-care system in the same mess as Medicare, the rest of us are still mindful of a recent past peppered with double-digit percentage increases in health premiums. It’s the single-digit difference in the opinions of nine justices that matters now. “We’re all waiting to see what the Supreme Court will do,” says Quinton Friesen, COO of Greenwich Hospital. “It’s very difficult to plan. You don’t know if you are going left or right.”
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4 Week of April 30, 2012 • Fairfield County Business Journal a division of Westfair Business Publications • www.westfaironline.com