By CHRIS POWELL
Someone had to be found to take over Waterbury Hospital, Manchester Memorial Hospital, and Rockville General Hospital in Vernon as they wallowed in bankruptcy after being looted by their private-equity owner, Prospect Medical Holdings. Connecticut couldn’t afford to let the hospitals go out of business and leave major population centers without service. The dislocation of patients and the burdening of the remaining hospitals would have been disastrous.
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But the resolution of Prospect’s bankruptcy presents its own serious problems.
Waterbury Hospital is to be acquired by the University of Connecticut Health Center in Farmington — that is, by state government. UConn Health is also planning to acquire two other troubled hospitals, Bristol Hospital and Day Kimball Hospital in Putnam.
Meanwhile Manchester and Rockville hospitals are to be acquired by Hartford HealthCare.
This means a big reduction in competition in the hospital business, since UConn already holds a large share of the market between Farmington and Waterbury and Hartford HealthCare operates not just Hartford Hospital but six other hospitals in the state.
Hundreds of millions of dollars probably will have to be spent to put the former Prospect hospitals back into decent condition. But UConn Health long has run big deficits and often has turned to state government for supplemental appropriations to cover them.
Further, while Waterbury Hospital is to be operated as a subsidiary of UConn Health, not as a state agency in its own right, the hospital’s unionized employees will strive to become de-facto state government employees with compensation increased to state-employee levels.
So UConn Health’s acquisition of Waterbury Hospital probably will deepen the money pit UConn Health has become and create an empire of expensive political patronage unless Governor Lamont and the General Assembly want a different result and pay close attention to operations. Of course since the governor and the legislature are Democratic, their inclination will be to maximize the patronage and expense, especially since medical care is already essentially a big racket of cost shifting and camouflaging that makes it impossible for the public to assign responsibility.
Indeed, the governor and the General Assembly have just authorized UConn Health to issue its own bonds and acquire hospitals beyond Bristol and Day Kimball, potentially creating a statewide government-operated hospital system. As the Yankee Institute’s Meghan Porfolio writes, “UConn Health can now buy hospitals, borrow money to expand them, and pass the debt to taxpayers.”
No oversight is in place for any of this. Of course there’s hardly any oversight in place for any state government operations, but the governor and legislature seem not to have given a thought to the need for oversight, even though Waterbury, Manchester, and Rockville hospitals were run into the ground in large part because state government provided so little oversight.
While Hartford HealthCare doesn’t have state government standing behind it, it hasn’t had the chronic financial trouble UConn Health has had. But Hartford HealthCare also may come under strain as it rehabilitates the Manchester and Rockville hospitals.
So prices to insurers and patients at all hospitals connected with these transactions are likely to rise along with the direct costs to state government from UConn Health’s expansion.
Waterbury, Manchester, and Rockville hospitals had to be kept going, and Bristol and Day Kimball hospitals must be kept going too. But the cost almost surely will be far higher than it should be and soon will be considered unavoidable when it wasn’t unavoidable at all.
NOT ENOUGH CHOICE: How strange that New York City had ranked-choice voting for its political party nominating primaries for mayor this year but not for the mayoral election itself, whose outcome might have been different if potential candidates and voters knew that ranked-choice voting would be available.
Socialist Democrat Zohran Mamdani won barely 50% of the vote in the election, even though his leading opponent was New York State’s disgraced and unlikeable former governor, Andrew Cuomo, who had been compelled to resign four years ago for sexually harassing women.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)
Chris Powell column 