National Nurses United (NNU) backs Bernie Sanders, supports socialized medicine, and wants to stop a private healthcare company from buying Catholic Medical Center (CMC) in Manchester.
And it is hoping to pressure New Hampshire Attorney General John Formella to block the purchase agreement between CMC and HCA Healthcare.
The nurses union is locked in a heated battle with HCA, with more than 10,000 of its members in six states negotiating contracts with the healthcare company. The NNU is playing hardball, particularly in North Carolina, where it’s offering strike classes to its members.
On July 20, that fight found its way to Manchester when a full-page ad appeared in the Union Leader — an open letter from a nurse at an HCA-owned hospital in Asheville. The letter urged New Hampshire Attorney General John Formella to use his authority and “stop the sale” of CMC.
The NNU has also launched an online petition asking Formella to intervene. It can be found at the “Medicare4All.org” website.
But Manchester community leaders and health care experts say HCA is throwing a lifeline to a hospital that is both vital to the city’s wellbeing and in deep financial trouble.
It’s no secret that CMC is struggling. The historic, nonprofit hospital — created in 1974 by the merger of Sacred Heart Hospital (formed in 1892) and Notre Dame de Lourdes Hospital (formed in 1894) — reported losing more than $45 million in 2023. CMC is currently losing two or three million dollars every month.
As a result, S&P Global downgraded its bond rating earlier this month.
“The downgrade reflects multiple years of sizable operating losses, which have continued during the fiscal 2024 interim period, as well as a deterioration in balance-sheet-related metrics,” said S&P Global Ratings credit analyst Marc Arcas.
The downgrade would have been larger, Arcas said, but S&P believes CMC’s economic future is relatively stable due to “management’s dedicated efforts to find a larger partner that can support the viability of the organization in the long-term, which have resulted in the asset purchase agreement with HCA.”
Formella’s role is a result of CMC’s status as a nonprofit, charitable hospital. Notice of its intended sale must be sent to the Attorney General, who serves as the state’s Director of Charitable Trusts, for his review. In the statement of notice to the state, CMC president and CEO Alex Walker describes the hospital’s condition in stark detail.
“New Hampshire’s health care landscape has transformed dramatically and the Hospital, as an independent hospital with limited resources, has struggled to meet these changing needs. Caring for one of the nation’s oldest populations with increasingly chronic and complex health conditions, while combatting one of the nation’s most acute opioid and substance use disorder crises, has posed significant clinical, financial, operational and workforce challenges for the CMC Transaction Parties, straining the Hospital’s capacity to respond to patient and community needs,” Walker wrote.
HCA is no stranger to New Hampshire. HCA has been a Granite State healthcare provider for 40 years, and it bought Frisbie Hospital, a 112-bed facility in Rochester that was also facing financial challenges, in 2020.
Supporters of the sale say NNU’s mission appears to be attacking HCA to gain leverage in their negotiations, rather than promoting a solution that would keep CMC open. The NNU blasted HCA as a “multibillion-dollar Wall Street giant” for its “scale and big-money connections” and accused it of reducing the quality of care.
As of August 2023, HCA Healthcare operates 186 hospitals and around 2,400 ambulatory care sites in 20 states and the United Kingdom.
Meanwhile, the NNU remains active in partisan politics. In the 2016 First in the Nation Democratic presidential primary, it endorsed Sen. Bernie Sanders over Hillary Clinton, spending at least half a million dollars on ads in early states like Iowa and New Hampshire. And it has endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris in this year’s race for the White House.
Local politicians say the focus should be on CMC and the role it plays in the community, not national political posturing.
“I recognize how vital the hospital is to the economic viability of our city, indeed to the 2,000 people who work there, to the people who are served there,” state Sen. Lou D’Allessandro (D-Manchester) said during a May 31 listening session.
“And it is foremost in my mind that that service be maintained at the same level that it has been for all of all of these years.”
