UofL and KentuckyOne Agree to Extend Their Academic Affiliation Agreement Another Four Months.

Barely within the statutory requirement for a response to an open records request, I received two critical pieces of the new contractual agreements between the University of Louisville and KentuckyOne Health that extend the current terms of their Academic Affiliation Agreement (AAA) and Master Support and Services Agreement (MSSA). These documents define the conditions and financial arrangements between the institutions for another four months with an option for automatic renewals. The extensions give some breathing room to the organizations currently working behind the scenes to determine the future of KentuckyOne’s operations in Louisville and simultaneously protect the ability of UofL to place students and trainees at Jewish Hospital and Fraser Rehabilitation Institute while simultaneously allowing Jewish Hospital (and Sts. Mary & Elizabeth) to maintain their status as a teaching hospital for Medicare purposes.

The AAA extends the financial obligations of KentuckyOne to the University until April 30, 2019 at the existing prorated monthly amount of $1.98 million for a total of an additional $7.92 million. This is a blessing for financially strapped UofL. The attachments to the agreements that I requested were not provided leaving me to assume that the intended ultimate beneficiaries of the continuing financial support remain unchanged. (Previous versions of Attachment-C contain a lot of personnel details so I will not to post a copy here.)

The two agreements referenced above are interlocking and these second amendments reinforce their connection.  Specifically, item 3 of the AAA notes that its Exhibit C is amended by adding the “Second Amendment to Master Support and Services Agreement.”  Linking the documents together makes sense, but I am not exactly sure what that looks like in final print, and I do not understand the reasons for changes in term-lengths of the Agreements.  The major clause in the new MSSA allows the agreements to automatically renew for periods of 10 months (up from the previous 6 months of potential auto-renewal) further deferring any last-minute anxiety for the concerned!  (There are several versions of earlier AAAs in circulation. The new language appears to amend Section 8.1 of the previous first amendment to the AAA by deleting and replacing its second sentence. In the original version of the AAA available to me, Section 8.1 contains only a single sentence! Any confusion is probably only mine and I will clarify later for this record if I can.)

Final Comment.
The extension of the agreements was, as I argue previously, critically important for the integrity of the two institutions. Obligations to students, trainees, and patients alone are manifestly inviolable. I commend KentuckyOne for shouldering its responsibility which will certainly present challenges. Its parent organization, Catholic Health Initiatives (CHI), has been under financial stress for some time and which I suspect has complicated its intended merger with Dignity Health anticipated at the end of this month. The long-sought goal of CHI to sell QualChoise, its poorly performing health insurance division, was recently announced and which may give the corporation some temporary room to maneuver financially.

As desirable as the extensions to the current Agreements are, the can is only being kicked further down the road. I have no information or prediction of what is yet to come. It is not clear that Blue Mountain Capital is currently the only party negotiating with KentuckyOne to buy its Louisville hospitals, or to what extent UofL will succeed in finding the money or a partner to take over (and at what non-financial cost).  We are still wandering in the dark woods without even a trail of breadcrumbs to follow. Not all fairytales end well for their protagonists.

Peter Hasselbacher, MD
Emeritus Professor of Medicine
President, KHPI
January 8, 2019

Our Unregulated Militia Is Killing Our Children.

Special interest  or public health issue?
I cannot conceive that any health professional would consider the incidence of death and injury from firearms as other than a public health issue. Surely the absolute numbers of people killed or injured (in excess of 100,000 per year); whether self-induced or by others; by accident or on purpose places the matter squarely before us on a regular basis no matter where we live. This uninterrupted endemic parade of victims is punctuated by epidemic outbreaks in crowded places like schools or workplaces.  There are carriers of this disease in all 50 states. No cure has emerged for this essentially American pandemic. The most recent outbreak which stimulated me to write this article occurred last month in Florida at the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland where 17 students were killed by another student, and 17 others wounded by an AR-15 military machine gun– a.k.a. assault rifle. The damage caused by this gun unnerves even hardened professionals.

Unlike most other epidemics of disease, reliable information about how to prevent non-military people from death-by-bullet is scarce because of a bizarre broad governmental prohibition to even study the matter. The self-censorship is deafening in a recent 476-page report from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.  It is titled, “Health, United States, 2016” but the words “gun” or “firearm” are not to be found in it. Disturbingly, it remains unclear that any meaningful national attempts to control this epidemic will be made or even that individual states will be permitted to do so.   Undeterred, advocacy groups are increasingly demanding that immediate and definitive action be taken to protect themselves and the rest of us.

Our young adults step forward.
Last Monday evening, I unexpectedly met a group of students from St. Francis High School here in Louisville who had come out for a program of Kentucky to the World to hear Nobel Laureate and scientist Phillip Sharp talk about the value of education for individuals and our communities. In chatting with the students, I learned that they were planning to participate in the National School Walkout to protest against gun violence and to demand gun control. I was touched by their commitment, and as a father of former students of St. Francis how could I not stand with them? Continue reading “Our Unregulated Militia Is Killing Our Children.”

More Expensive Medical Services or Products Does Not Equate To Better.

I have been writing articles for this health policy blog since 2009– almost all of the 390 posts since 2011. Of them, the one most frequently accessed by the public is a 2012 article titled “Horse Liniment for Your Arthritis and Healthcare Reform.”  I encourage you to read it also, because it provides my background for this article, and explains why I write a lot about how pharmaceutical companies – with the active consent of our elected government officials – are gouging the public. The earlier article caught my attention because of a tiny advertisement in the Courier-Journal notifying me that an “arthritis pain mystery” had been solved and that the secret was horse liniment. In my studied professional opinion, the claims were vastly overblown and that in any event, the “secret” was not a secret at all. The ingredients in the horse liniment were available in a variety of over-the-counter joint-rub-ons at a fraction of the cost of the “miracle” liniment offered for sale. I lament the fact that the public at large could be motivated to part with their money in such a way, but alas, physicians are equally as vulnerable to bamboozlement by the traditional pharmaceutical industry– think OxyContin. Sadly, the marketing approaches I wrote about in 2012 are still alive and well. Such advertisements in the Courier-Journal are now bigger and more numerous than ever.  A recent such sparked today’s article. Continue reading “More Expensive Medical Services or Products Does Not Equate To Better.”

KentuckyOne Health Has Already Sold Most of Its Real-estate Assets in Louisville.

KentuckyOne’s two acute care hospitals and its business operations in Louisville still remain on the sales block.

Soon after I clicked the button to publish last week’s update on the status of the sale of Catholic Health Initiative’s assets in Louisville, I was told by an anonymous reader that a group of capital investors was the last of potential buyers still in the game. Perhaps naively I have been assuming that only other hospital systems would be interested in acquiring the clinical operations of  Catholic Health Initiatives (CHI)/ KentuckyOne Health in Louisville. I was aware that at least parts of one of the doctors office buildings next to downtown Jewish Hospital had been transferred to a new landlord.  A quick look at the Jefferson County Property Valuation Administrator’s (PVA) website and a bit of Internet research revealed much more.  Beginning in 2015 and finishing in the spring of 2016, CHI sold all of its local medical office buildings and outpatient medical centers (of which I am aware) to a single, investor-owned, national real-estate investment trust (REIT) – Physicians Realty Trust and Physicians Realty L. P.  (Nasdaq- DOC).  I must be the last person in Louisville who knew the extent of these real-estate sales.   This third-party owner is now necessarily a major player in planning the future of not only the downtown medical Center, but the healthcare infrastructure of the Jefferson County region. The rents must flow! Continue reading “KentuckyOne Health Has Already Sold Most of Its Real-estate Assets in Louisville.”