Special committee has little time to review UNC-Carolinas hospital deal

A UNC special committee has until Dec. 20 to say whether or not a partnership between the UNC Health Care System and Carolinas HealthCare of Charlotte will be good for North Carolina’s citizens.

But first committee members need to know exactly how such a partnership will work – details they didn’t have when they held a public meeting on Wednesday.

The special committee was formed Monday by the University of North Carolina system’s Board of Governors. Their first meeting on Wednesday included a brief overview of their mission and then went into closed session for about an hour.

The only committee member who attended the meeting in person was R. Doyle Parrish, founder of Summit Hospitality Group, a hotel management company in Raleigh. The other five attended by conference call.

On Tuesday, Amanda Martin, general counsel to the North Carolina Press Association, criticized the timing of the meeting – the day before Thanksgiving, one of the busiest travel days of the year. Martin called it “bad policy” to schedule an important meeting when few members of the public would be able to attend.

“Time is of the essence,” Parrish said after the meeting. “This is an important asset to the state of North Carolina. It’s our fiduciary responsibility to see that it’s handled appropriately and in the best interest of the citizens of North Carolina.”

The committee members agreed they would need to hire an outside law firm and financial advisers to identify loopholes and boobytraps that would likely escape notice by an untrained eye.

The committee expects to meet again in two weeks and to hold multiple meetings between now and its Dec. 20 deadline to recommend for or against the partnership. It is expected that other public meetings will also be held in closed session to discuss confidential details of the proposed partnership.

In August, UNC Health Care and Carolinas HealthCare said they would form a joint operating company that would be overseen by an independent board. The deal was announced just days after the UNC Board of Governors met in closed session to approve the partnership in concept and to authorize UNC to begin negotiations with Carolinas HealthCare. The two health care partners expect to finalize the details in January.

The two organizations insist that their union is not a “merger,” but the distinction has been lost on some doctors and elected officials who are keenly interested in the partnership’s implications for North Carolina.

The new health care entity would operate more than 50 hospitals and employ about 90,000 people.

The proposal immediately sparked concerns that an organization of that size would leverage price increases for itself and raise health care costs in the state. North Carolina Attorney General Josh Stein has already said his office is examining whether the pending deal will harm health care competition in the state.

The leaders of both organizations vowed their commitment to increasing access to health care, especially in rural areas that have chronic shortages of doctors and hospitals.

In addition to Parrish, the special committee’s members are auto parts magnate O. Temple Sloan III; health care attorney Carolyn Coward; N. Leo Daughtry, a Smithfield lawyer and longtime state lawmaker; Randall Ramsey, founder and president of Jarrett Bay Boatworks in Beaufort; and corporate lawyer W. Louis Bissette Jr.

They plan to examine the financial risks to UNC Health Care, as well as the pros and cons to UNC’s School of Medicine. Parrish said their report and recommendations will be made public.

Parrish said the outside lawyers and financial advisers will analyze “other systems that have attempted to do what they’re proposing to do and the successes of those systems.”

Parrish added that the outside experts will also assess “the hazards within those outcomes.”

“It’s a changing world,” Parrish said. “What we’re being told from the hospital board is we need to have certain things in our set of how we operate to effectively compete in the new world, and to provide the outcomes that you – the state of North Carolina – and the system is expecting.”

This story was originally published November 22, 2017 at 5:15 PM with the headline "Special committee has little time to review UNC-Carolinas hospital deal."