Lead LNP article is headed “Most health system mergers don’t meet expectations — Will Lancaster General Health and U. Penn be different?”
It then opens as follows:
“It’s possible Lancaster General Health’s absorption into the University of Pennsylvania Health System would, in the words of the organizations’ Oct. 28 press announcement, ‘improve access to cost-effective, high quality care.’
“If it does, however, it will be an exception to the general rule, industry experts said.
“Hundreds of U.S. health systems have merged in recent years, but ‘the benefits have been elusive,’ said Martin Gaynor, a professor of economics and health policy at Carnegie Mellon University and former director of the economics bureau at the U.S. Federal Trade Commission.”
WATCHDOG: This is a rare and excellent piece of LNP journalism and credit should go to Tim Stuhldreher, a business writer for the newspaper. However, no reporter gets to write, let alone have published, such a critique without the direction of his editor. And no LNP editor would dare to print an objective article concerning Lancaster General Health without permission from ownership.
Therefore, three wags of the tail for the reporter on up.
What LGH wants us to believe is it is too early to discuss a potential merger. (We will demonstrate this tomorrow.) By the time of any announcement of details of a deal about to be culminated, there will not be sufficient time allowed for a third party critical analysis and possible litigation to prevent or modify the terms.
Unlike with past generations, Lancaster has recently suffered establishment members ripping off the community for private profit and through folly. We have the Convention Center. We have the CRIZ program. Now the crown jewel, the supposedly non-profit General Hospital, worth at least a billion dollars – that’s about $20,000 per person; $60,000 per Lancaster family – could be turned over to others.
And if so, we can suspect that some participants will have feathered their own nests.
Let’s hope that this investigatory reporting is not a onetime effort on the part of LNP, but rather they will assign Stuhldreher, perhaps along with veteran Gil Smart, to continue to pose tough questions to General Health’s president Tom Beeman and to publish happenings with mergers elsewhere.
The task is daunting, because LGH has long surrounded itself with an ‘iron curtain’ of secracy. Moreover, its board of trustees is not at all representative of the community that theoretically is it owner, but rather is loaded with white members of the Lancaster establishment. The board has far too many members to effectively serve as a community safeguard.
Meanwhile, a collection should be undertaken by private citizens – we pledge the first $10,000 – to put together a legal fund in case it is necessary for the citizenry to rouse the state’s attorney general office or to go to court, should the merger not be clearly in Lancaster’s best interest.
