Celebration Or Not?
Photo Source UConn Health Center
Posted 3/15/10
Last week, Republican Gov. Jodi Rell announced yet another plan to rescue and renovate the University of Connecticut’s financially-challenged Health Center and John Dempsey Hospital in Farmington. Dozens of Health Center medical staff, students, and personnel filled the stairwells and corridors around Rell making the event look more like a grand opening instead of first word on a possible compromise.
State House Majority Leader Denise Merrill (D-Mansfield), who attended the event, and is supportive of the effort, was blunt about the status of the plan. “Even though it (Rell’s announcement) did look like a ceremonial ribbon-cutting kind of thing—like a done deal, it is not,” she said.
For one thing, a $100 million element of the $352 million proposal would come from federal funding. U.S. Sen. Christopher Dodd (D-CT) has tried to insert the funding into President Obama’s health care reform legislation. According to the Washington-based news website Politico.com, the President, down on “earmark” items that smack of being special goodies for key lawmakers, is asking Senate leaders to remove the hospital grant program.
Merrill said she views Dodd’s item as more of a challenge grant, available to competing states, and not a selective “earmark”, but she warned that unless Connecticut wins the $100 million dollars, the UConn deal could collapse. “I don’t see this project, in this form, happening without that $100 million dollars,” Merrill said. Rell agrees that the project may hinge on the federal money.
UConn President Michael Hogan told key legislators if the feds don’t come through, the state and the university might still be able to secure all or part of the $100 allotment through philanthropic sources or other federal outlets.
Rell’s proposal also calls for $227 million in state bonding, achieved in part by canceling several already-authorized projects. Because this is a legislative election year, that will have to be done carefully. Asking for lawmakers votes on the UConn plan while zapping some bonding projects important to their districts as they seek reelection could be a political disaster.
Merrill believes that dilemma can be avoided. “The Governor put out a list of projects that could be de-authorized, and some of them are very old, going back ten years, and sometimes the projects just aren’t going to happen,” she explained.
Another fragile element of the Rell plan is what she calls the “UConn Health Network”, an attempt to erase distrust and anger among Hartford-area hospitals that any bid to build a bigger Dempsey Hospital and UConn Health Center could weaken their patient base and fiscal stability at a time all health institutions are in stress.
Getting the hospitals to work in collaboration with UConn, as proposed in the Rell plan, could defuse the angst. For example, the proposal calls for the Health Center’s neonatal intensive care unit to remain at Dempsey Hospital, but it would be run by the Connecticut Children’s Medical Center of Hartford.
About $20 million would be used for a regional primary care institute at Hartford’s St. Francis Hospital that would be open to all health care professionals, as would a regional simulation and conference center at Hartford Hospital.
The UCconn Health Center would get $236 million for a new patient tower at Dempsey Hospital and $96 million to renovate and upgrade the research and academic space at the University’s Farmington health campus.
Sounding a bit like Husky sports boosters, Hogan and UConn Board of Trustees chair Lawrence McHugh claimed the improvements could push the UConn Medical-Dental Schools into “the top tier” of the nation’s medical schools.
Merrill avoided the “top tier” hoopla, but said she will try to persuade her fellow lawmakers that finalizing a modernization plan for the UConn Health Center is “much like the argument for an enhanced University of Connecticut itself.” The massive building programs in the last decade at UConn’s Storrs campus transformed the school in a private-public fundraising effort that won positive reviews in many quarters.
Doing nothing for the Health Center would result in ‘jeopardizing our medical school,” Merrill intoned. “Those are assets for the entire state,” she said. “Those are our sons and daughters who attend that school, and it’s extremely important for the life of the state—that’s where our doctors are going to come from,” Merrill said.
Reporters asked Rell if she proposed the Health Center rescue plan so it could be her “legacy project” as she winds down her last year in office. The governor brushed aside that suggestion, but supporters of the Health Center really don’t care if that’s how Rell wants to view it. They are just happy to have her on board, because her opposition to past rescue plans has been one reason the process has taken so long to resolve.