As of now I assume most everyone has seen the news regarding WakeMed considering selling itself to Atrium Health from charlotte usa.
This is a terrible decision for at least 2 reasons:
Most notably, this will NOT reduce health care costs for Wake County residents. In fact, it is most likely to do the opposite & drive costs up. Atrium also threatens UNC & Duke because they would be so large they could pay doctors even more than UNC & Duke potentially. Atrium doesn’t even come close to comparison against Duke or UNC Health but money talks. charlotte usa is obsessed with being big for bigness sake. I know I don’t give a shit about how big my hospital and the last thing I want is for my doctor to use ‘budgets’ in his or her decision process. BUT this is exactly what will happen & Wake County will have no say.
From a business perspective this is the equivalent of losing a headquarters. Do you really want anyone in charlotte to have a say over your medical care? Executive jobs will disappear & there WILL be layoffs in Raleigh
Fortunately there are voices sounding the alarm. The WakeMed CEO should be fired for lack of transparency in this supposed ‘deal’. He doesn’t own WakeMed. Wake County taxpayers do. This is not a publicly traded company.
EMAIL your Wake County Commissioners to DENY this deal from happening. Political pressure CAN kill this nonsensical transaction.
I would not say all mergers are bad: Duke acquiring Raleigh Community Hospital and UNC acquiring Rex have been pretty solid deals for those respective facilities, if anything the worst things about those deals were that it made it harder for WakeMed (which provides extremely vital services, such as the only level 1 trauma ER in the county) to compete. The competitive landscape for them is only set to worsen with the new NC Childrens Hospital (UNC/Duke collab) coming to Apex.
It might be that the deal with Atrium is what WakeMed needs in order to stay relevant. But one thing for sure, a single weekend to review the deal is not transparent. It feels shady. Not nearly enough time for the public to digest the impacts.
Literally no one in their right mind wants this done. It only benefits Atrium and WakeMed execs, everyone else would be getting the short end of the stick. Employees are against it, patients are against it, but most importantly….WAKE COUNTY taxpayers are against it. Charlotte’s biggest healthcare system has NO business buying Wake County’s biggest healthcare system…It’s an oxymoron. And that’s not even factoring in the shady backroom dealings that resulted in a Friday announcement that the board would vote to on it’s approval the very next business day. Disappointed isn’t the word. I’m pissed about this entire debacle. My son was born at WakeMed. It is/was truly the best healthcare system in Wake County, but this threaten’s to dismantle decades of all the goodwill that WakeMed has built-up across Wake County literally overnight. Fire everybody involved!
Immediate loss of many HR and office jobs once the merge goes through. Those jobs already filled in Charlotte. Charlotte C-Suites have already sucked up Greensboro’s office market I guess it’s time for Raleigh to get the same treatment.
Certain people surely knew and have discussed this action for a while. But to make a public announcement on Friday and then ask for holy water on Monday is…a choice.
Probably makes sense at a financial level. But PR needs to get some info out stat.
Consolidation is certainly a thing. Note that Atrium Health (NC and Georgia) is a subsidiary of https://www.advocatehealth.org/ (also based in Charlotte).
Still some scar tissue here from the Duke Energy takeover of Progress Energy. But this may make sense. So convince us it does.
A concern I have is that, although Atrium and its holding company are nonprofit for now, this puts a hypothetical future decision to sell out to a for-profit operator into the hands of an entity that is not based in Raleigh. And once you hand that control over, you are NEVER getting it back.
For Duke and UNC, with Raleigh Community and Rex, the university affiliation was enough for me to feel assured that this would not happen. But Atrium: who knows?
BTW, if you want to know what selling out to a for-profit hospital company is like, just ask Asheville. (Hint: It’s been something that rhymes with Rad, but means pretty much the opposite.)
I have family ties to WakeMed, and I’m not happy to see them taken over. But let’s be realistic. As an independent entity, WakeMed does not have access to the capital that Duke and UNC do. More significantly, WakeMed’s traditional core of profitability has been cardiac care – an area where Duke and UNC have made inroads. The status quo is that WakeMed’s market share will continue to shrink.
Atrium is part of Advocate, a non-profit. The Charlotte core of Atrium started as a charity hospital of St Peter’s Episcopal Church. This is not at all like the horrible situation in Asheville where Mission was sold to the for-profit HCA.
I’m not aware of anyone who has complained about Rex after UNC took it over.
The CEO of Atrium/Advocate had $25.8 million total compensation in 2024. Probably more in 2026. There’s nothing non-profit about the organization for the CEO.
The State doesn’t own Duke, and no one objected when Duke bought Raleigh Community Hospital. Or is this really a Charlotte vs Triangle thing?
We could have a long OT discussion on CEO compensation. Whatever the Atrium/Advocate CEO earns is spit in the ocean compared to what for-profit CEOs get. Musk, for example. Non-profit CEOs don’t have stock options like their for-profit counterparts do, so they’re paid in cash. And frankly, I bet running Atrium/Advocate is more difficult than running Tesla. $25 million is not out of line for a $10 billion operation. I bet Atrium/Advocate spends $25 million on tissues, paper towels, and toilet paper every year.
“Even if you’re not a WakeMed consumer of their health care services [or] if you’re with Duke Health, competition raises prices after some of these merger events,” Barrett said.
This merger isn’t an effort to save people money. It’s to make money. Non-profits still need to make money. So I would rather some health care systems stay local and the jobs stay local. The only investment being mentioned is to turn WakeMed into a premium product when that niche is already fulfilled and this just means that basic healthcare will be secondary and likely more expensive to offset any investments.
I have no idea if it’s true that nobody objected to that acquisition, seeing as it happened the year I was born, and I’m fast-approaching 30 years old; but Raleigh Community Hospital was not the largest health system by market share in Wake County, and Duke Health was not one of the largest chains of hospitals in country, or headquartered in what might as well be another state.
Raleigh Community Hospital was part of one of the more infamous for-profit hospital networks (HCA) when Duke took it over in the ‘90s. No one objected because no one was upset. This is not that.
Incidentally HCA paid it’s CEO around $26 million last year fwiw.
This deal has “sketch’ written all over it. The simple fact they tried to pull a fast one on a Friday should tell everyone all they need to know.
as for charlotte usa vs Raleigh…..let’s just look at the history of any charlotte company buying any other company from another NC city & tell me how well that worked out for those cities or towns? charlotte usa only gives a shit about one thing….charlotte usa. it kills them that the state capital is Raleigh & we have a much smarter demographic with all of the research universities based here.
Let’s simply look at the transactions below & see how its worked out.
Lowes - Wilkesboro (How’s that working for Wilkesboro?)
Wachovia - Winston Salem. (side note: the egomanics in charlotte managed to ultimately destroy both Wachovia & First Union in the end…which ended up being acquired by Wells Fargo in the bailout)
BB&T - Winston Salem
Krispy Kreme - Winston Salem
Progress Energy - Raleigh
Not a single instance in the 5 transactions above have resulted in an economic benefit to the city that lost the business…..despite all the rhetoric about ‘how good this would be for Winston Salem….) espoused by the charlotte ceos when the deals were announced.