Commissioners hear a report on the Hospital Authority | Eastern North Carolina Now

    Publisher's Note: This article originally appeared in the Beaufort Observer.

    The Beaufort County Board of Commissioners heard a report from Hood Richardson, its representative on the Beaufort Health System Authority board at its regular November meeting Monday (11-14-11) night.

    Richardson reported that the Authority has met and gotten organized, appointing him chairman and has made arrangements for its operation. The Authority is the "left over" agency of the selling of the hospital to University Health Systems. In that acquisition UHS agreed to pay nearly 7 million to the County as a part of the consideration in the deal. But while the original deal called for that money to be paid as a net premium at closing, UHS came back after doing their so-called "due diligence" and said that they would only agree that the money be placed in an escrow account to cover any outstanding liabilities that UHS was not assuming. We have never been told what those liabilities are, but there are rumors that the amount could be substantial. So substantial in fact that the County might not end up with any "net premium" after all is said and done.

    In the meantime, the Authority is responsible for overseeing that money. That is the essence of the report Richardson gave the Commissioners. We will have more on this issue later, but the video below of his report 'gets you up to speed' with where we are now.



    We are working on learning more about the "unknown liabilities" that may become encumbrances on this money but at this point all the parties are being very secretive about them. But this much we do know. There are some very stringent laws related to business arrangements in which principals and entities who provide health care may have a conflict of interest or may have billed Medicaid and Medicare incorrectly. For example, we know that some of the doctors who were actively pushing for UHS and against other bidders were either already connected to UHS or were interested in becoming connected with them. These same doctors refer patients for treatment or the purchase of products and services from various health care providers. We even heard that some doctors warned that they would not refer patients to other providers other than UHS. Some of them have/had lease arrangements with various entities. The applicable laws generally hold that it is a conflict of interest for a health care provider to refer a patient to another entity if the health care provider has a vested interest in the entity to whom they are referring patients. Because Medicare and Medicaid pay for many of these services and products once the patient is treated they are sensitive to the "interlocking" relationships among providers. It's a complex system and precisely what liabilities may have been created that became the liabilities of Beaufort Regional Health System are not known yet.

    That will be a part of the duty of the newly revised Hospital Authority to sort out.