UConn Health Center Partnership Plans Submitted
By Daniela Altimari, The Hartford Courant, Conn.
Aug. 4–Five local hospitals have submitted proposals to partner with the financially troubled University of Connecticut Health Center.
One of those proposals was put forth jointly by Hartford Hospital and The Hospital of Central Connecticut. The others were submitted independently by St. Francis Hospital and Medical Center, Connecticut Children’s Medical Center and Bristol Hospital.
The deadline for the hospitals to express interest was Friday. Today, UConn issued a press release announcing the responses.
For the UConn Health Center, the stakes couldn’t be higher. Without regional cooperation, the institution that includes the state’s medical and dental schools, a multimillion-dollar research laboratory and the John Dempsey Hospital will have no choice but to continue seeking millions in aid annually from taxpayers.
The center’s leaders have long maintained that Dempsey Hospital, at 224 beds, is too small to survive on its own. The hospital has struggled financially since it opened in the 1960s. Since then, the Health Center has operated with annual deficits that topped out at $22 million this year and has been kept afloat by yearly emergency infusions of tax dollars from the state legislature. The crisis came to a head again in 2007, when UConn officials said they wanted to spend $495 million to build a new 352-bed hospital in Farmington to replace the aging John Dempsey.
The Health Center’s urban competitors immediately cried foul, claiming that a new facility in the prosperous Farmington Valley would lure their privately insured patients to seek care in the suburbs, leaving them with the financial burden of caring for the region’s poor. In an effort to compromise, UConn President Michael J. Hogan proposed a regional partnership as an alternative to building a new hospital.
“The regional hospitals’ interest in partnering with the health center is gratifying,” Hogan said in a press released issued today. “It speaks to the Health Center’s unique role as the state’s only public academic medical center. It also highlights the significant benefits of such a partnership to quality health care in the region and to the state’s long-term economic development by attracting biomedical research funding and developing new patents, technologies and partnerships with business and industry.”
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