The Vatican has approved the sale of St. Mary’s Hospital in Passaic, and unions representing nurses and technicians there have overwhelmingly ratified contracts with the potential new owner.
Now state officials are reviewing thousands of pages of documents about the deal before deciding whether the century-old hospital can be operated by Prime Healthcare Services, a for-profit hospital chain based in California.
Ed Condit, St. Mary’s chief executive officer, said he hopes the state will approve the sale by July. Without Prime, he said, the hospital will close.
St. Mary’s, the sole survivor among three hospitals in the city, would be the first hospital in New Jersey acquired by Prime. The privately owned company has expanded in two years from 14 California hospitals to 23 in five states, and hopes to add St. Mary’s, St. Michael’s Medical Center in Newark and a couple of other New Jersey hospitals to its holdings.
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In reviewing the sale, the state Attorney General’s Office has asked for details about allegations of billing problems at hospitals Prime operates in California as well as information about the process that led the board of trustees at St. Mary’s to choose Prime as its buyer.
Ten volumes — 5,000 pages of supporting material — have been submitted in response to those questions.
The board took “considerable comfort that it oversaw an objective, transparent process,” St. Mary’s lawyers said in board’s answer to questions posed in the review, which is required whenever a non-profit hospital is sold to a for-profit entity. Its members were “confident that the purchase price is reasonable and fair and that Prime, as an acquirer, is in the best interest of St. Mary’s and the community.”
According to the documents filed with the state, eight potential bidders originally expressed interest. They included: Hackensack University Medical Center; Barnabas Health, the state’s largest hospital system; Community Healthcare Associates, a group known for converting Paterson’s Barnert Hospital into a medical mall; Prospect Medical Holdings, a for-profit California company owned by a private equity group; the Danza Group, a real estate company that specializes in developing “decommissioned” hospitals, and Warwick Investors, whose chief executive had been involved in a for-profit acquisition of an Illinois hospital.
In the end, the only two that actually bid were Prime and Hudson HoldCo, a group of three New Jersey investors that also owns Bayonne Medical Center, Hoboken University Medical Center and Christ Hospital in Jersey City.
Both said they would keep the hospital open — Prime for five years, HoldCo for seven — as a full-service hospital that adhered to Catholic teachings, according to the state filings
Date: 04/25/2013