The Supreme Court’s historic ruling on LGBTQ nondiscrimination could sideline the Trump administration’s new policies on health care and adoption.
Why it matters: The ruling’s ripple effects will be felt immediately, and could ultimately derail regulations the administration had finalized just days ago.
The big picture: Federal civil rights law prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex, and the Supreme Court said Monday that “sex” includes sexual orientation and gender identity.
Monday’s case was specifically about employment, but the same legal interpretation will likely carry over to other areas, most notably health care — and that could cause problems for some of the Trump administration’s policies.
Between the lines: Just a few days before the Supreme Court’s ruling, the Department of Health and Human Services rolled back Obama-era rules that banned health care providers from denying care to trans patients.
That was based on the Trump administration’s interpretation of what constitutes “sex” discrimination — that it only encompasses biological traits defined at birth. That is, broadly, the same interpretation the high court rejected on Monday.
What’s next: The court’s ruling does not automatically invalidate the health care rules, but would make them much harder to defend in court. And if the administration doesn’t withdraw the rules, those lawsuits are coming.
“The court here today clearly articulated that discrimination based on sexual orientation, discrimination based on gender identity, are forms of sex discrimination,” said Alphonso David, president of the Human Rights Campaign.
“So, we are expecting the administration to rescind their rule immediately,” he said. “If they don’t, we are prepared to continue to use all of our resources, including litigation, to sue them and make sure that the rule is never implemented,”
HHS declined to answer questions about the regulations in light of Monday’s ruling.
Federal adoption guidelines could also be affected by the court’s decision.
The Trump administration has been working on rules that would make it easier for adoption and foster agencies to refuse to work with same-sex couples. Those rules would also face lawsuits if and when they’re finalized.
The specific legal foundations at issue there are somewhat different, but now that the Supreme Court has said civil-rights law prohibits discrimination on the basis of sexual identity and gender identity, any policy allowing such discrimination is going to face a steeper climb in the courts.
The bottom line: It may take a while for some of these issues to work their way through the courts, but the Supreme Court’s ruling Monday will make many forms of LGBTQ discrimination harder to defend, and in the scheme of things, that will likely happen pretty quickly.
ProPublica deputy managing editor Charles Ornstein wanted to know why experts were wrong when they said U.S. hospitals would be overwhelmed by COVID-19 patients. Here’s what he learned, including what hospitals can do before the next wave.
The prediction from New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo was grim.
In late March, as the number of COVID-19 cases was growing exponentially in the state, Cuomo said New York hospitals might need twice as many beds as they normally have. Otherwise there could be no space to treat patients seriously ill with the new coronavirus.
“We have 53,000 hospital beds available,” Cuomo, a Democrat, said at a briefing on March 22. “Right now, the curve suggests we could need 110,000 hospital beds, and that is an obvious problem and that’s what we’re dealing with.”
The governor required all hospitals to submit plans to increase their capacity by at least 50%, with a goal of doubling their bed count. Hospitals converted operating rooms into intensive care units, and at least one replaced the seats in a large auditorium with beds. The state worked with the federal government to open field hospitals around New York City, including a large one at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center.
But when New York hit its peak in early April, fewer than 19,000 people were hospitalized with COVID-19. Some hospitals ran out of beds and were forced to transfer patients elsewhere. Other hospitals had to care for patients in rooms that had never been used for that purpose before. Supplies, medications and staff ran low. And, as The Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday, many New York hospitals were ill prepared and made a number of serious missteps.
All told, more than 30,000 New York state residents have died of COVID-19. It’s a toll worse than any scourge in recent memory and way worse than the flu, but, overall, the health care system didn’t run out of beds.
“All of those models were based on assumptions, then we were smacked in the face with reality,” said Robyn Gershon, a clinical professor of epidemiology at the NYU School of Global Public Health, who was not involved in the models New York used. “We were working without situational awareness, which is a tenet in disaster preparedness and response. We simply did not have that.”
Cuomo’s office did not return emails seeking comment, but at a press briefing on April 10, the governor defended the models and those who created them. “In fairness to the experts, nobody has been here before. Nobody. So everyone is trying to figure it out the best they can,” he said. “Second, the big variable was, what policies do you put in place? And the bigger variable was, does anybody listen to the policies you put in place?”
So, why were the projections so wrong? And how can political leaders and hospitals learn from the experience in the event there is a second wave of the coronavirus this year? Doctors, hospital officials and public health experts shared their perspectives.
The Models Overstated How Many People Would Need Hospital Care
The models used to calculate the number of people who would need hospitalization were based on assumptions that didn’t prove out.
Early data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention suggested that for every person who died of COVID-19, more than 11 would be hospitalized. But that ratio was far too high and decreased markedly over time, said Dr. Christopher J.L. Murray, director of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington. IHME’s earliest models on hospitalizations were based on that CDC data and predicted that many states would quickly run out of hospital beds.
A subsequent model, released in early April, assumed about seven hospitalizations per death, reducing the predicted surge. Currently, Murray said, the ratio is about four hospital admissions per death.
“Initially what was happening and probably what we saw in the CDC data is doctors were admitting anybody they thought had COVID,” Murray said. “With time they started admitting only very sick people who needed oxygen or more aggressive care like mechanical ventilation.”
A patient with COVID-19 is taken into Mount Sinai Hospital in New York on May 3. (Alexi Rosenfeld/Getty Images)
A model created by the Harvard Global Health Institute made a different assumption that also turned out to be too high. Data from Wuhan, China, suggested that about 20% of those known to be infected with COVID-19 were hospitalized. Harvard’s model, which ProPublica used to build a data visualization, assumed a hospitalization rate in the United States of 19% for those under 65 who were infected and 28.5% for those older than 65.
But in the U.S., that percentage proved much too high. Official hospitalization rates vary dramatically among states, from as low as 6% to more than 20%, according to data gathered from states by The COVID Tracking Project. (States with higher rates may not have an accurate tally of those infected because testing was so limited in the early weeks of the pandemic.) As testing increases and doctors learn how to treat coronavirus patients out of the hospital, the average hospitalization rate continues to drop.
New York state’s testing showed that by mid-April, approximately 20% of the adult population in New York City had antibodies to COVID-19. Given the number hospitalized in the city and adjusting for the time needed for the body to produce antibodies, this means that the city’s hospitalization rate was closer to 2%, said Dr. Nathaniel Hupert, an associate professor at Weill Cornell Medicine and co-director of the Cornell Institute for Disease and Disaster Preparedness.
Dr. Ashish Jha, director of the Harvard Global Health Institute, and his team also assumed that between 20% and 60% of the population would be infected with COVID-19 over six to 18 months. That was before stay-at-home orders took effect nationwide, which slowed the virus’s spread. Outside of New York City, a far lower percentage of the population has been infected. Granted, we’re not even six months into the pandemic.
A number of factors go into disease models, including the attack rate (the percentage of the entire population that eventually becomes infected), the symptomatic rate (how many people are going to show symptoms), the hospitalization rate for different age groups, the fraction of those hospitalized that will need intensive care and how much care they will need, as well as how the disease travels through the population over time (what is known as “the shape of the epidemic curve”), Hupert said.
Before mid-March, Hupert’s best estimate of the impact of COVID-19 in New York state was that it would lead to a peak hospital occupancy of between 13,800 to 61,000 patients in both regular medical wards and intensive care. He shared his work with state officials.
David Muhlestein, chief strategy and chief research officer at Leavitt Partners, a health care consulting firm, said one takeaway from COVID-19 is that models can’t try to predict too far into the future. His firm has created its own projection tool for hospital capacity that looks ahead three weeks, which Muhlestein said is most realistic given the available data.
“If we were held to our very initial projection of what was going to happen, everybody would be very wrong in every direction,” he said.
Hospitals Proved Surprisingly Adept at Adding Beds
When calculating whether hospitals would run out of beds, experts used as their baseline the number of beds in use in each hospital, region and state. That makes sense in normal times because hospitals have to meet stringent rules before they are able to add regular beds or intensive care units.
Workers prepare dozens of extra beds that were delivered to Mount Sinai on March 31. (Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
But in the early weeks of the pandemic, state health departments waived many rules and hospitals responded by increasing their capacity, sometimes dramatically. “Just because you only have six ICU beds doesn’t mean they will only have six ICU beds next week,” Muhlestein said. “They can really ramp that up. That’s one of the things we’re learning.”
Take Northwell Health, a chain of 17 acute-care hospitals in New York. Typically, the system has 4,000 beds, not including maternity beds, neonatal intensive care unit beds and psychiatric beds. The system grew to 6,000 beds within two weeks. At its peak, on April 7, the hospitals had about 5,500 patients, of which 3,425 had COVID-19.
The system erected tents, placed patients in lobbies and conference rooms, and its largest hospital, North Shore University Hospital, removed the chairs from its 300-seat auditorium and replaced them with a unit capable of treating about 50 patients. “We were pulling out all the stops at that point,” Senior Vice President Terence Lynam said. “It was unclear if the trend was going to go the other way. We did not end up needing them all.”
Northwell went from treating 49 COVID-19 inpatients on March 16 to 3,425 on April 7. “I don’t think anybody had a clear handle on what the ceiling was going to be,” Lynam said. As of Wednesday, the system was still caring for 367 COVID-19 patients in its hospitals.
As hospitals found ways to expand, government leaders worked with the Army Corps of Engineers to build dozens of field hospitals across the country, such as the one at the Javits Center. According to an analysis of federal spending by NPR, those efforts cost at least $660 million. “But nearly four months into the pandemic, most of these facilities haven’t treated a single patient,” NPR reported. As they began to come online, stay-at-home orders started producing results, with fewer positive cases and fewer hospitalizations.
Demand for Non-COVID-19 Care Plummeted More Than Expected
Hospitals across the country canceled elective surgeries, from hip replacements to kidney transplants. That greatly reduced the number of non-COVID-19 patients they had to treat. “We generated a lot more capacity by getting rid of elective procedures than any of us thought was possible,” Harvard’s Jha said.
Northwell canceled elective surgeries on March 16, and over the span of the next week and a half, its hospitals discharged several thousand patients in anticipation of the coming surge. “In retrospect, it was a wise move,” Lynam said. “It just ballooned after that. If we had not discharged those patients in time, there would have been a severe bottleneck.”
What’s more, experts say, it’s clear that some patients with true emergencies also stayed home. A recent report from the CDC said that emergency room visits dropped by 42% in the early weeks of the pandemic. In 2019, some 2.1 million people visited ERs each week from late March to late April. This year, that dropped to 1.2 million per week. That was especially true for children, women and people who live in the Northeast.
In New York City, emergency room visits for asthma practically ceased entirely at the peak, Cornell’s Hupert said. “You wouldn’t imagine that asthma would just disappear,” he said. “Why did it go away? … Nobody has seen anything like that.”
Undoubtedly some people experienced heart attacks and strokes and didn’t go to the hospital because they were fearful of getting COVID-19. “I didn’t expect that,” Jha said. A draft research paper available on a preprint server, before it is reviewed and published in an academic journal, found that heart disease deaths in Massachusetts were unchanged in the early weeks of the pandemic compared to the same period in 2019. What that may mean is that those people died at home.
The Coronavirus Attacked Every Region at a Different Pace
Some initial models forecast that COVID-19 would hit different regions in similar ways. That has not been the case. New York was hit hard early; California was not, at least initially.
In recent weeks, hospitals in Montgomery, Alabama, saw a lot of patients. Arizona’s health director has told hospitals in the state to “fully activate” their emergency plans in light of a spike in cases there. The Washington Post reported on Tuesday that hospitalizations in at least nine states have been rising since Memorial Day.
St. Luke’s, a closed hospital in Phoenix, is prepared to receive overflow patients on April 23. Arizona initially wasn’t hit hard, but cases are now spiking. (Ross D. Franklin/AP Photo)
Dr. Mark Rupp, medical director of the Department of Infection Control and Epidemiology at the University of Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha, said his region hasn’t seen a tidal wave like New York. “What we’ve seen is a rising tide, a steady increase in the number of cases.” Initially that was associated with outbreaks at specific locations like meatpacking and food processing plants and to some degree long-term care facilities.
But since then, “it has just plateaued,” he said. “That has me concerned. This is a time when I feel like we should be working as hard as we can to push these numbers as low as possible.”
Rupp’s hospital has been caring for 50 to 60 COVID-19 patients on any given day. The hospital has started to perform surgeries and procedures that had been on hold because “elective cases stay elective for only so long.”
The hospital’s general medical/surgical beds are 70% to 80% filled, and its ICU beds are 80% to 90% full. “We don’t have a big cushion.”
Even in New York City, the virus hit boroughs differently. Queens and the Bronx were hard hit; Manhattan, Brooklyn and Staten Island less so. “Maybe we can’t even model a city as big as New York,” Hupert said. “Each neighborhood seemed to have a different type of outbreak.”
That needs further study but could be attributable to both social and demographic conditions and the type of jobs residents of the neighborhoods had, among other factors.
What We Can Learn From Coronavirus “Round One”
While hospitals were able to add beds more quickly than experts realized they could, some other resources were harder to come by. Masks, gowns and other personal protective equipment were tough to get. So were ventilators. Anesthesia agents and dialysis medications were in short supply. And every additional bed meant the need for more doctors, nurses and respiratory therapists.
In early February, before any cases were discovered in New York, Northwell purchased $5 million in PPE, ventilators and lab supplies just in case, Lynam said. “It turned out to be a wise move,” he said. “What’s clear is that you can never have enough.”
Northwell has spent $42 million on PPE alone. “We were going through 10,000 N95 masks a day, just a crazy amount,” he said. “One of the lessons learned is you have to stockpile the PPE. There’s got to be a better procurement process in place.”
If there’s one thing the system could have done differently, Lynam said, it’s bringing in more temporary nurses earlier. Northwell brought in 500 nurses from staffing agencies. “They came in a week later than they should have.”
Dr. Robert Wachter, chair of the department of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, agreed. “I’ve helped run services in hospitals for 25 years,” he said. “I’ve probably given two minutes of thought to the notions of supply chains and PPE. You realize that is absolutely central to your preparedness. That’s a lesson.”
Experts and hospital leaders agree that everyone can do better if another wave hits. Here’s what that entails:
Having testing readily available, as it now is, to more quickly spot a resurgence of the virus.
Stocking up now on PPE and other supplies. “We definitely have to stockpile PPE by the fall,” Gershon of NYU said. “We have to. … [Hospitals and health departments] have to really get those contracts nailed down now. They should have been doing this, of course, all the time, but no one expected this kind of event.”
Being able to quickly move personnel and equipment from one hot spot to the next.
Planning for how to care for those with other medical ailments but who are scared of contracting COVID-19. “We have to have some sort of a mechanism by which we can offer people assurance that if they come in, they won’t get sick,” Jha said. “We can’t repeat in the fall what we just did in the spring. It’s terrible for hospitals. It’s terrible for patients.”
Providing mental health resources for front-line caregivers who have been deeply affected by their work. The intensity of the work, combined with watching patients suffer and die alone, was immensely taxing.
Coming up with ways to allow visitors in the hospital. Wachter said the visitor bans in place at many hospitals, though well intentioned, may have backfired. “When all hell was breaking loose and we were just doing the best we could in the face of a tsunami, it was reasonable to just keep everybody out,” he said. “We didn’t fully understand how important that was for patients, how much it might be contributing to some people not coming in for care when they really should have.”
Lynam of Northwell said he’s worried about what lies ahead. “You look back on the 1918 Spanish flu and the majority of victims from that died in the second wave. … We don’t know what’s coming on the second wave. There may be some folks who say you’re paranoid, but you’ve got to be prepared for the worst.”
Tower Health on Tuesday announced that it is cutting 1,000 jobs, or about 8 percent of its workforce, citing the loss of $212 million in revenue through May because of the coronavirus restrictions on nonurgent care.
Fast-growing Tower had already furloughed at least 1,000 employees in April. It’s not clear how much overlap there is between the furloughed employees, some of whom have returned to work, and the people who are now losing their jobs permanently. Tower employs 12,355, including part-timers.
“The government-mandated closure of many outpatient facilities and the suspension of elective procedures caused a 40 percent drop in system revenue,” Tower’s president and chief executive, Clint Matthews, wrote in an email to staff. “At the same time, our spending increased for personal protective equipment, staff support, and COVID-related equipment needs.”
Despite the receipt of $66 million in grants through the federal CARES Act, Tower reported an operating loss of $91.6 million in the three months ended March 31, according to its disclosure to bondholders.
In 2017, Tower paid $418 million for five community hospitals in Southeastern Pennsylvania — Brandywine in Coatesville, Chestnut Hill in Philadelphia, Jennersville Regional in West Grove, Phoenixville in Phoenixville, and Pottstown Memorial Medical Center, now called Pottstown Hospital, in Pottstown.
Tower’s goal was to remain competitive as bigger systems — the University of Pennsylvania Health System and Jefferson Health from the Southeast, Lehigh Valley Health Network and St. Luke’s University Health Network from the east and northeast, and University of Pittsburgh Medical Center from the west — encroached on its Berk’s county base.
Tower had set itself a difficult task in the best of times, but COVID-19 has made it significantly harder for the nonprofit, which had an operating loss of $175 million on revenue of $1.75 billion in the year ended June 30, 2019.
“Hospitals and all other health service providers were hit with this disruption with lightning speed, forcing the industry to learn in real time how to handle a situation for which there was no playbook,” Standard & Poor’s analysts David P. Peknay and Suzie R. Desai said in a research report last month.
Tower’s said positions will be eliminated in executive, management, clinical, and support areas.
The cuts include consolidations of clinical operations. Tower plans to close Pottstown Hospital’s maternity unit, which employs 32 nurses and where 359 babies were born in 2018, according to the most recent state data. Tower also has maternity units at Reading Hospital in West Reading and at Phoenixville Hospital.
Tower is aiming to trim expenses by $230 million over the next two years, Matthews told staff.
Like many other health systems, Tower has taken advantage of federal programs to ensure that it has ample cash in the bank to run its businesses. Tower has deferred payroll taxes, temporarily sparing $25 million. It received $166 million in advanced Medicare payments in April.
In the private sphere, Tower obtained a $40 million line of credit in April for St. Chris, which has lost $23.6 million on operations since Tower and Drexel bought it in December. Last month, Tower said it was in the final stages of negotiating a deal to sell and then lease back 24 medical office buildings. That was expected to generate $200 million in cash for Tower.
Coronavirus cases and hospitalizations are reaching alarming levels in some states.
What they’re saying: “Arizona is the new national hotspot for COVID-19 with more than 4,400 new cases in just the last 72 hours. Per capita, Arizona’s infection rate is now more than three times higher than New York state. It’s spreading like wildfire,” Rep. Greg Stanton tweeted last night.
The big picture: Several states have seen record numbers of new cases over the last few days, including Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Florida, North Carolina, Oklahoma and South Carolina, Reuters reports.
On Saturday, Texas reported 2,242 coronavirus hospitalizations — a record for the state, per the Houston Chronicle. Health officials are becoming concerned about hospital capacity.
Arkansas, North Carolina and Utah also had record numbers of patients enter the hospital on Saturday, per Reuters.
“South Carolina recorded nearly 800 new coronavirus cases on Sunday, setting another single-day record and raising the state’s seven-day average for the 17th day straight,” the Post and Courier reports.
The bottom line: There’s never been any reason to think that states with mild outbreaks in April weren’t at risk of having a crisis in June, especially states that haven’t taken lockdowns or social distancing as seriously.
“This is not the second wave of the pandemic in states like Arizona, Texas, Utah, California, and Florida. Unlike in New York, the first wave never ended in these places,” the Kaiser Family Foundation’s Larry Levitt tweeted.
Rep. Katie Porter recently received an explanation of benefits from her insurer saying that, in addition to the $20 co-pay she paid when she got her coronavirus test, she may be on the hook for an additional $56.60.
The catch: The law requires insurers to cover coronavirus testing without cost-sharing. Porter knows that because she voted for it.
Why it matters: Containing the coronavirus depends on knowing who has it, and it’s going to be much harder to get people to get tested if they think they’ll have to pay for it. But it’s becoming increasingly clear that patients may be vulnerable to surprise coronavirus bills.
Between the lines: Porter, who received a coronavirus test on March 23, has insurance through UnitedHealthcare and shared her explanation of benefits with Axios. Congress has required both the test itself and the associated care to be covered without cost-sharing.
In a statement, UnitedHealth Group said it has waived member cost-sharing for coronavirus testing and treatment.
“Some members received bills early on when there were not yet specific COVID-19 billing codes and during a period in which code adoption was first taking place,” the company said, adding that it’s waiving those charges and evaluating claims from earlier this year to make sure they were handled correctly.
“We are not authorized to talk about [Porter’s] specific situation without permission, however, what likely occurred is that her provider used the wrong billing code for the visit. To confirm if that’s the case and have it corrected, we encourage Rep. Porter to contact us so we can clarify with her directly.”
Yes, but: There’s a huge question of who should have to pay for coronavirus testing as it becomes more prolific, and many insurers — United included — have said that they’ll only cover tests that are “medically necessary,” at least without cost-sharing. It’s unclear who will pay for tests that aren’t deemed medically necessary.
The federal government hasn’t said who should pay for testing when, whether it be insurers, employers or the government itself. Insurers are questioning whether they should be on the hook for the hundreds of thousands of tests of asymptomatic people that public health experts say will need to be conducted every day.
Even though Congress has tried to resolve payment disputes between insurers and out-of-network labs,there’s a loophole that would allow patients to receive balance bills from out-of-network labs in some circumstances.
If a patient sees an out-of-network doctor for a coronavirus test, they’re vulnerable to receiving a surprise medical bill from this provider — just as they are under normal, non-coronavirus conditions, said Loren Adler, associate director of the USC-Brookings Schaeffer Initiative for Health Policy.
What they’re saying: “We will not be able to truly reopen and rebuild if Americans rightly fear costly medical bills for visiting their health care providers for coronavirus tests,” Porter writes in a letter to top Health and Human Services officials being sent today, asking the administration to implement the law more forcefully.
She also asked for “formal, explicit guidance for insurers, providers, employers like nursing homes and assisted living facilities, and testing companies, as well as all 50 states…to ensure patients and workers are not asked to pay any costs.”
The Covid-19 pandemic has devastated the health-care industry. In addition to the tragedies that the pandemic has brought, health systems have universally experienced severe and rapid deterioration of their bottom lines due to plummeting patient volumes, pausing of high margin elective surgical procedures, and increased expenses.
By some estimates, health system losses will be around $200 billion by the end of June and revenues have dropped by around 50 percent. As a result of the financial uncertainty caused by the pandemic, many hospital and health systems terminated or delayed potential transactions as they focused on managing the crisis and protecting their workforces and communities.
But this may just be the calm before a big M&A storm.
Rise in M&A Activity
Through our work as legal and communications counselors, we have seen preliminary M&A activity rise in recent weeks, with providers exploring and negotiating transactions, including several that have not yet been publicly announced.
Some systems are looking to capitalize on the time between the end of the first wave of Covid-19 and a potential resurgence in the fall to get letters of intent finalized and announced. This coming M&A activity presents legal and communications challenges when the national spotlight is firmly on health systems.
Providers are starting to resurrect deals that were paused during the initial period of the Covid-19 crisis, including Community Health System’s sale of Abilene Regional Medical Center and Brownwood Regional Medical Center to Hendrick Health System.
Some systems are seeking new strategic partners, such as Lake Health in Ohio, and New Hanover Regional Medical Center in North Carolina, which resumed its recent RFP response process after a pause.
Still others are looking for new opportunities consistent with pre-Covid growth strategies, as adjusted for pandemic-related developments and challenges.
More Consolidation
Larger and more financially robust health systems are expected to weather the crisis, whereas smaller systems and hospitals with less cash and tighter operating margins, including rural and critical access hospitals, may be facing insolvency, closure, and bankruptcy. This creates a scenario where one party is financially distressed as a result of the pandemic and needs to partner with or join another system to survive. These circumstances will likely fuel increased consolidation in the health-care industry.
For a struggling provider, joining a larger system can offer much-needed financial commitments, access to capital, disciplined management structure, economies of scale for purchasing and improved IT infrastructure, among many other strategic benefits. A well-positioned system, even if financially weakened due to pandemic challenges, will be able to negotiate favorable deal terms if it has significant strategic value to its prospective partner.
Communications Strategy is Important
As providers explore and execute partnerships, they must implement a stakeholder and communications strategy that focuses on benefits for each side given the new financial reality. Doing so will minimize criticism of opportunism by the acquiring system—and best position a definitive agreement and successful deal.
An effective communications strategy will emphasize how the proposed transaction will maintain or improve quality or affordability, ensure access to care for communities and address financial challenges faced by health systems as a result of the pandemic.
Health systems should articulate how their M&A activity will stabilize affected health systems, allow them to manage the Covid-19 crisis and future pandemics, and continue to meet the overall care needs of the community. It can also highlight how these partnerships will facilitate continued care in a market, which otherwise might lose a valuable health-care resource, as well as the positive economic benefits the transaction will bring for local communities.
Communications that support the vision, rationale and benefits of a deal will also need to be relevant to the regulatory bodies whose approval may be required.
Public perception and support of health-care providers have been extremely positive during the pandemic to date, as evidenced by homemade banners, balcony tributes, and praise on social media. Health systems and their staffs have borne personal risk and financial pain by focusing on patients and public health at the expense of all else. This goodwill can be valuable as health systems seek stakeholder and community support for their transactions.
That goodwill can also quickly be forgotten.
As health systems race to the altar to beat out competitors for M&A targets and other strategic relationships, it is critical that they are thoughtful in structuring their deals and justifying the activity.
For example, acquisitions and partnerships involving substantial outlays of capital and lucrative executive compensation or severance packages will be viewed negatively if undertaken by a system that instituted large compensation reductions across the system or even furloughed or laid off employees during the pandemic.
As the dust begins to settle from the first wave of Covid-19, it is clear that there will be drastic changes to how health systems do business. The pandemic will also create financial winners and losers. Hospitals and health systems must think proactively about a strategy for growth as opportunities with willing transaction partners arise.
But being proactive must be balanced against appearing to be opportunistic or taking advantage of the worst health crisis in our lifetimes. To maintain their goodwill and reputations, health systems should continue to do deals for the right reasons and for the benefit of their communities.
As the industry braces for the next phase of COVID-19, experts at Kaiser Permanente are sharing several key capabilities that will be critical to prepare for another potential surge.
In an article for NEJM Catalyst, leaders at the healthcare giant highlight eight focus areas health systems must consider as the country reopens and offer a look at how Kaiser Permanente tackled those challenges.
A critical starting point, they write, is a robust testing program that feeds into essential contact tracing and monitoring of any spikes in cases. As of May 18, Kaiser Permanente has performed more than 233,706 diagnostic tests and is also tracking the spread telephonically through its call centers as well as secure emails between patients and doctors.
The Oakland, California-based system is also mulling greater use of patient symptom surveying and harnessing data within electronic health records to further enhance the testing effort, according to the article.
Stephen Parodi, M.D., executive vice president at The Permanente Federation and Kaiser Permanente’s national infectious disease leader, told Fierce Healthcare that the goal of the paper is to spotlight how crucial it is to consider all fronts in preventing the spread of COVID-19.
“I think one of the biggest takeaways here is that we need a complete and comprehensive approach to suppress the virus,” Parodi, one of the report’s lead authors, said.
Bechara Choucair, M.D., senior vice president and chief health officer at Kaiser Permanente, is also one of the paper’s lead authors.
The other capabilities included in the report are:
Enhanced contact tracing and isolation efforts
Robust community health efforts
Home health care options
Ability to maintain surge capacity
Targeted and safe strategies to reopen
Ongoing research on the virus
Effective communication with patients
Parodi said two of the biggest challenges Kaiser Permanente faced in working through this checklist of capabilities were a lack of supplies and the need to work alongside other organizations.
He said that didn’t only mean strengthening and reinforcing existing relationships with community groups but also reaching out to other health systems and providers to coordinate plans and work together.
It also required coordination between officials and policymakers at all levels of government, he said.
“Having the leaders at individual medical centers working with the county level folks is really key to making sure that we’re aware of each other’s work and response, then actually syncing them together,” Parodi said.
Parodi also said that Kaiser Permanente went “wholesale” into using telehealth during the initial surge of COVID-19 cases, and now the system and its physicians will be working together to determine where virtual care is most appropriate and effective, as the interest in and growth of those services isn’t going away anytime soon.
He added that moving into the reopening phase poses its own set of challenges, because it’s an “unprecedented” situation to navigate.
Kaiser Permanente is aiming to center shared decision-making and patient education in the response to reopening, he said, while also providing guidance to support providers. That way, decisions are ultimately made by the doctor and patient, but they’re informed and guided decisions, he said.
“There is no set playbook for how to do it right,” Parodi said.
The Internal Revenue Service has issued guidance that implements a change in the 2017 tax overhaul that imposed a 21 percent excise tax on compensation paid to executives at some nonprofit organizations, according to Bloomberg Tax.
Under the 2017 law, there’s a tax on a nonprofit organization’s five highest-paid employees earning at least $1 million. The tax, paid by the organization, has been in effect since 2018, but the new guidance provides details on how to calculate employee wages and other compensation to determine if the tax applies, according to the report.
Under the proposed rule, any deferred compensation or retirement bonus not vested before the first taxable year beginning after Dec. 31, 2017, is subject to the tax, according to the American Hospital Association.
The AHA urged Congress to provide an exception for existing contracts or nonqualified deferred compensation plans for tax-exempt healthcare organizations.
Charlotte, N.C.-based Atrium Health committed to spending $3.1 billion to enter into a long-term lease and make improvements to New Hanover Regional Medical Center in Wilmington, N.C.
Atrium Health is one of three health systems working to secure a deal to partner or own New Hanover Regional. The health system presented its proposal June 11.
During the presentation, Atrium Health proposed entering into a 40-year, long-term operating lease before becoming the owner. The system said it would pay $941.8 million, including $50 million in upfront cash to the county, lease payments and community foundation funds. It also said it would invest up to $2.17 billion for capital improvements.
Under the deal, if selected, New Hanover Regional would maintain a local governance structure, and also have two seats on Atrium Health’s board.
The other two health systems interested in acquiring the hospital are Durham, N.C.-based Duke Health and Winston-Salem, N.C.-based Novant Health. Duke Health proposed purchasing the hospital for $1.4 billion and investing $1.9 billion in capital improvements over the next five years. Novant Health proposed spending $5 billion.
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HENRY KOTULA 