Well this does seem to be about where Atrium is based, to me from reading these comments. Here in the Charlotte area, we have 2 major health care systems Atrium and Novant. Novant is from Winston and Atrium is based in Charlotte. Duke bought a smaller hospital in Mooresville and renamed it Duke Lake Norman. But they are a very small player. Raleigh has 3 current hospital groups in your market Duke, UNC and WakeMed. This is not consolidating them to 2. I don’t know about Wake Med’s finances but would you feel better if it was Sentara from Norfolk? Or Advent Healthcare from Orlando which operates 1 and is building another hospital in western NC? I am not sure Vidant has the finances to take over WakeMed. I do not like HCA which bought Mission Hospital in Asheville. The state just turned town Novant’s proposal for a hospital in Knightdale.
But Atrium invests in all of its hospitals, you should see the growth at Atrium WF Baptist hospital in Winston that has happened after the merger. How do yall feel about Novant? Novant just bought several hospitals in the lowcountry of SC and the of course the main hospital in Wilmington. Seems like WakeMed is the smaller of the 3 healthcare systems in the Triangle.
When Novant bought Presbyterian Hospital in Charlotte decades ago there was some concern but they continued to invest in their hospitals and open new ones in Charlotte metro.
charlitte USA & atrium offered the deal they did as a bribe to get Wake Forest to agree to a satellite campus in clt……sorry I meant to say charlottes “1st full time 4-year medical school”
It’s very on brand with Charlotte. They can’t make anything original so they acquire it from somewhere else. @kjhburg If Atrium were willing to relocate a meaningful share of its office footprint and executive leadership to the Raleigh area, it might read less like an extraction and more like an investment. As it stands, Raleigh risks being treated as just another line item useful, but distant without the kind of leadership presence that usually signals real attention or priority.
This is what the WakeMed CEO said himself in a Biz Journal article
Gintzig said WakeMed could survive without the deal. But over time, he said, it could face pressure to consider a sale that could remove local control.
“If we fail to do this, we may not have that choice, in fact, for 10 years,” Gintzig said. “And then you lose that opportunity to maintain what you are and keep what you need going forward.”
I don’t work for Atrium just a patient of one of their affliated doctors and many family members have been in their various hospitals including the one in Winston Salem. They all got great care.
also from the article
“Under the proposed combination, WakeMed would convert from a no‑member nonprofit to a single‑member nonprofit, with Atrium as the sole member. WakeMed’s board would continue to include 14 voting directors, with Wake County appointing eight members and Atrium appointing six.”
But to me it sounds like many think an Atrium partner would cause the hospital to become a weaker player in the market. I think the opposite will happen but I guess we will see. WakeMed is much smaller than Duke and UNC Healthcare both based outside of Wake County I might add.
So the question people are asking isn’t “will Atrium provide good care?” The question is whether Raleigh keeps meaningful local control once WakeMed gets folded into a way bigger system headquartered somewhere else.
WakeMed obviously has pressure from Duke and UNC and I get why leadership thinks they need more scale long term. The concern is more what this looks like 10-15 years down the road and who is actually calling the shots at that point.
That’s why people keep looking at the structure and not just the board seat numbers. Yeah Wake County appointing 8 directors vs Atrium appointing 6 sounds good on paper. But WakeMed would also become a single-member nonprofit with Atrium as the sole member. In these big nonprofit systems that can come with way more authority than just counting board seats. Stuff like bylaws, mergers, major strategy decisions, assets, all that kind of thing.
And honestly this is kinda what always happens with giant systems. At first it’s all “local identity will stay the same” and then slowly more executive decisions and planning get centralized somewhere else. If all the top leadership stays in Charlotte then Raleigh eventually risks becoming just another regional branch in a much bigger network.
The real question is not control. Not to say that control does not matter, but it’s a means to an end. The real goal is high quality health care delivered equitably and affordably to Wake County residents. If giving up some degree of local control helps achieve that end then maybe that’s the cost of doing business.
Catching up on comments here and saw two folks mention Novant—NO NO NO.
My extended family in Winston can talk your ears off for hours about how down the gutter Forsyth Hospital went when Novant took over. Trust me they are no good.
merging doesn’t change what the government pays you.
Correct, but it can lower costs and thereby maintain positive operating margins. Only one IT group is needed to maintain Epic, for example. Another is purchasing. Hospitals buy everything from 7-figures imaging machines to toilet paper. I can almost guarantee you that any hospital network the size of UNC, Atrium, or larger is getting lower prices on its purchases than an isolated hospital like WakeMed.
The UNC deal fell apart because the egomaniacs in clt thought
they would control a public asset in UNC’s school of medicine.
Ironically there’s a story in today’s The Assembly saying "In 2018, Stein may have spooked UNC Health and Atrium executives when they attempted to merge when he made civil investigative demands under a broad law that allows the attorney general to inspect corporations. That deal ultimately fell through because the systems couldn’t decide on who would be in charge.”
But in a sense, we are violently agreeing. UNC didn’t want to take the subordinate position in the deal, and that’s exactly what would have happened.
As for adult ERs, my best experience by far has been UNC-CH. But for a Raleigh resident it is a longer drive, and Medicare and some private insurance companies will not pay for an ambulance to an ER that is farther away than another.
No other city wants atrium to own their hospital hence the only ones that agreed to this were poor struggling chains in Illinois & Georgia. They bribed Wake Forest University with a shit ton of money so they could claim charlotte usa has a 4 year medical school (we mean satellite of WFU)
Atrium NEEDS Raleigh money.
WakeMed/Raleigh do NOT need this deal. It’s bad for patients & Raleigh.
Eventually the morons killing Medicaid funding will kill off all of their rural constituent hospitals & voters might change their minds & start funding again when the Democrats take over.
Atrium must have bribed the CEO with some stupid pay package.
Hopefully the State regulators & Raleigh powers that be will kill this transaction.
they may not be able to stop a a publicly traded company deal BUT they can stop a healthcare deal. Nobody sees this as a good thing…..except mecklenburg usa.
Gintzig has run WakeMed for 13 years after resigning from the Navy, where he was acting deputy surgeon general. The deal might or might not be to any given person’s liking, but lighten up on the guy. 13 years is an eternity in hospital administration.
I believe he was quoted in the N&O that there has been a frequent stream of companies expressing desire to acquire WakeMed. (Every other hospital chain sees the predicament that WakeMed is in.) If all the board wanted to accomplish was to sell, they could have done so long before now.
Whether Atrium specifically as the buyer is the right way forward, that’s a separate question.
This article also reinforces he is full of shit. He has a hard on for atrium…i can only guess whatever comp package they are offering his ego is the reason.
UNC is a state owned asset. Do you really think they won’t take care of poor people??
Absolutely full transparency on what WakeMed executives will receive as a result of this action is needed. These sort of merger deals always have a smell of executive corruption. Will he simply be let go and then receive a rich Golden Parachute because his job is being made redundant?
I attended one of WakeMed’s community sessions yesterday evening at their North Raleigh hospital. He leaned hard on the need for new investment but he also didn’t deny that WakeMed wants higher reimbursements - aka patients will be paying for this. (In fairness he did imply that more generous financial assistance would be available to families making up to 400% of the poverty line.)
sounds like the ‘listening tour’ has been nothing more than the CEO trying to justify the deal. If he was looking for higher reimbursements, why would you not consider UNC Health’s deal which is 2.5X ‘higher’ than a charlotte based hospital chain???
The fact he’s been colluding behind closed doors for 2 years with only 1 entity stinks…especially when you have 2 of the worlds top research university hospitals next door. He likes to spin the ‘competition’ argument however charlotte usa ONLY has 2 hospitals in the market…not 3… so doing a deal with UNC Health that’s 2.5X better financially for WakeMed doesn’t really reduce ‘competition’ like he is trying to claim.
PLUS…as I’ve said UNC Health is a NC-owned entity. Who is more likely to play nicely with say…Blue Cross Blue Shield…of North Carolina…who happens to support the majority of NC state employees health insurance???
