Mount Sinai Hospital Plans Big Merger Amidst Fierce Oppositon

In a rather unexpected development today, Mt. Sinai hospital announced it wanted to do a mega merger with a couple of other medical facilities, including Roosevelt Hospital on the West Side.

 Spokespeople for Mt. Sinai said the merger was necessary to bring down the cost of health care and to keep Mt. Sinai and the other hospitals from going the way of St. Vincent's in Greenwich ( see " The Tragedy of St. Vincent's" in the July 10 posting of Midtown Blogger.

Critics, including public advocacy groups, hotly contested the approval of the huge merger, saying it would limit services available to the public and mean less competition between hospitals  and thus ultimately higher prices for everything for everybody.

The new merger would be something on a huge scale, even involving hospitals in Brooklyn.

People in Brooklyn are particularly alarmed by the deal, because of the number of hospital closings there that have happened already or have been threatened.

This from the Brooklyn Daily Eagle pretty much sums it up:

Hospital giants Mt. Sinai, Continuum plan to merge

If the merger of Mount Sinai Hospital and Continuum Health Partners goes through as proposed, hospitals like Beth Israel’s Kings Highway division, shown here, would be part of the biggest hospital system in the city. Photo courtesy Google Maps

By Mary Frost

Brooklyn Daily Eagle

Brooklynites still bitter about Continuum’s LICH history

In what would produce the city’s biggest hospital system, the boards of Mount Sinai Hospital and Continuum Health Partners said Thursday that they had approved a memorandum of understanding for a merger.

Dr. Kenneth L. Davis, president and CEO of Mount Sinai Medical Center, said the combination would create “economies of scale, increase efficiencies, and expand access to advanced primary and specialty care” throughout the network.

A merger would create a system with 3,351 beds, according to WNYC. That would make it larger than the largest private hospital in the city currently, New York-Presbyterian.
While increasing efficiencies for the hospitals, large mergers like this one raise anti-trust concerns at the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). Because mergers lessen competition, prices for health care can rise to the consumer.

“The increasing consolidation of hospital markets -- and the federal antitrust response to those consolidations -- are issues not only of significant interest in this community, but also of national concern,” said Robert Leibenluft, FTC’s Assistant Director of Health Care, at a health forum in Michigan.

The final agreement would be subject to approval by both boards and by government authorities, and is not necessarily set in stone. In June, two weeks after Continuum announced a merger with NYU Langone Medical Center the agreement fell apart after Mount Sinai made Continuum this counter offer.

The Mount Sinai Medical Center includes both Mount Sinai Hospital and Icahn School of Medicine. Physicians and scientists affiliated with Continuum would become part of the medical school’s academic faculty. Continuum operates Beth Israel, St. Luke’s and Roosevelt hospitals.

In Brooklyn, Beth Israel runs a 212-bed community hospital on Kings Highway. Mt. Sinai operates an outpatient office offering primary and specialist care at One Pierrepont Plaza in Brooklyn Heights.
Brooklynites are still bitter about Continuum’s past affiliation with Long Island College Hospital (LICH) in Cobble Hill in 1998. After stripping the 150-year-old hospital of valuable real estate and other resources, Continuum divested itself of LICH in 2011 after SUNY Downstate agreed to acquire the hospital.

Now SUNY Downstate plans to close LICH.
The recent wave of hospital closings and mergers in Brooklyn has created a degree of chaos among patients and clinics in Downtown Brooklyn. On Friday, for example, one Brooklyn mom discovered that her daughter’s doctor, who recently changed her affiliation from LICH to Mount Sinai, no longer accepted her insurance. A staffer at Mount Sinai’s Brooklyn Heights office said she had “no idea” about the proposed merger with Continuum.

In terms of profitability hospital mergers are the wave of the future. According to Moody’s, "Given current looming headwinds confronting the sector, those hospitals left out of consolidations, especially smaller stand- alone hospitals that cannot match the financial, managerial or market access capabilities of larger multi-hospital systems, will face greater negative rating pressure going forward.”