The ticking clock
There is still time for UPMC to change course
Jeffrey Romoff has an important choice before him, and the clock is ticking. The high-priced president and CEO of UPMC (he rakes in $6 million and change annually) could use his formidable intelligence and drive to craft a fair agreement with Highmark before the June 30 expiration of a consent decree that allows cross-network access.
Or he can continue as the Betrayer-in-Chief.
He has betrayed the memory of Henry and Elsie Hillman and the charitable foundations that bear the family name. In an extraordinarily candid interview, David K. Roger, president of the Hillman Family Foundations, said the city’s respected philanthropists would have “found it inconceivable” that the UPMC/Highmark fight, simmering during the last years of their lives, has morphed after their deaths into a war that would deny people access to the cancer center they helped to build. They and their foundations gave to UPMC so all people could have access to cutting-edge medical care, not have it withheld from them.
Mr. Romoff also has betrayed the people of Western Pennsylvania who have contributed mightily, over decades, to free care for hospital patients who couldn’t pay.
He has betrayed communities that sacrifice tax revenue (nonprofits don’t pay property taxes) as UPMC gobbles up more and more land in an effort to build more and more facilities that will be out-of-network for more and more people.
He has betrayed UPMC’s stated mission “to serve our community by providing outstanding patient care and to shape tomorrow’s health system through clinical and technological innovation, research and education.” The statement doesn’t say of our community.”
He has betrayed the true meaning — and perhaps even the legal meaning, according to Pennsylvania’s top prosecutor, Josh Shapiro — of what it means to be charitable.
Rather than charitable, calculating, cut-throat, cold and conquering come to mind.
If Mr. Romoff and the cohorts on his board of directors were playing a chess game, we’d have to call them masterful. Way back, when UPMC was just one more excellent Pittsburgh area hospital in a field of a half-dozen or so, it had aspirations of growing. And it did, buying swaths of vacant land for future enterprises, then scooping up other hospitals, then wrangling doctors and practitioners to sign on as exclusive UPMC providers — or lose their right to practice in UPMC’s ever-expanding places of business.
That’s the provider/ facilities end of the operations. We can’t forget their entree into the insurance business. When bickering began with Highmark over reimbursement rates, UPMC decided to form its own health plan, rightly anticipating the plan would grow and grow as UPMC’s stranglehold on providers and facilities tightened and tightened.
Here’s what we’ve ended up with, according to UPMC’s website: Mr. Romoff presides over one of the nation’s leading nonprofit health systems, one that “has evolved from an outstanding academic medical center into a fully integrated $19 billion global health enterprise . ... With 87,000 employees, UPMC is the largest nongovernmental employer in Pennsylvania and is transforming health care by integrating 40 academic, community and specialty hospitals, 700 doctors’ offices and outpatient sites, and a 3.5 million-member health insurance services division, the largest medical insurer in Western Pennsylvania.”
Wow. This sounds so much like a corporate behemoth that it is easy to forget it is supposed to be a nonprofit.
It’s not too late. Mr. Romoff and his board still have time for a change of heart. Civic leaders in greater Pittsburgh, including members of the UPMC board, have an obligation to speak up now as Mr. Roger did. Lives are at risk. Promises have been broken. What is right and what ought to happen are crystal clear.