If West Penn Allegheny Health System is so concerned about the closing of UPMC Braddock, it can have the hospital for free.
Health giant University of Pittsburgh Medical Center on Friday reiterated an offer it made to Braddock leaders last month.
UPMC is willing to work with community leaders to come up with an acceptable use for the hospital, even if they choose to hand it over to rival West Penn Allegheny, said UPMC spokesman Paul Wood.
"We will gift the building to the community," Wood said one day after West Penn Allegheny ran full-page newspaper ads expressing concern about UPMC Braddock, which is slated to close in January.
UPMC would not object to West Penn Allegheny's involvement, Wood said, "as long as it serves the needs of the community and West Penn doesn't engage in a self-serving commercial transaction."
Officials at West Penn Allegheny said they don't have the money to run another struggling hospital. The network, the second-largest in the region after $8 billion UPMC, is trying to sustain money-losing West Penn Hospital in Bloomfield after systemwide net losses of more than $80 million in the past year.
West Penn Allegheny CEO Dr. Christopher Olivia said he would meet with UPMC leaders only to talk about the offer he made in the ad the Tribune-Review published. The offer urged UPMC to stop plans to build a hospital near West Penn Allegheny's campus in Monroeville and instead put that money toward the Braddock facility.
"West Penn Allegheny's proposal stands, and we are not motivated by a desire to own additional facilities," Olivia said. "Rather, we are concerned that the residents of Braddock and the surrounding area have adequate access to quality care in their community."
Braddock Mayor John Fetterman called UPMC's offer empty and self-serving.
"It's not a sincere offer," Fetterman said. "Who's going to do something with a 300,000-square-foot building on Braddock Avenue that's configured as a hospital? Who has the deep pockets to do that?"
Not West Penn Allegheny, which according to ratings agency Moody's Investor Service remains in a "still tenuous" financial position despite posting a $2.1 million fourth-quarter profit the last fiscal year. In a rating update last week, Moody's said West Penn Allegheny is in a delicate transition phase and cited among its chief concerns a weak unrestricted cash position and an underfunded pension plan.
Wood said West Penn Allegheny's newspaper ad has nothing to do with Braddock and everything to do with a need to increase patient volume. West Penn Allegheny, whose admissions are projected to drop 2 percent in 2010, said patients expected to go to UPMC's Monroeville site instead could go to West Penn's Forbes Regional campus about a mile away.
"If UPMC could not succeed in Braddock ... there's probably not another health system anywhere in the United States that could, and certainly not a health system that's in a tenuous financial position," Wood said.
Jan Jennings, president and CEO of consulting firm American Healthcare Solutions, said UPMC was smart to exit weak markets such as Johnstown and Aliquippa. He said Braddock is an "exhausted physical facility, and the investment of capital in an area with a diminishing population doesn't make sense."
"With sympathy for the local community, while they offer it for free to anyone, I can't imagine anybody coming forward and saying, 'Oh yeah, we'll run this,' " Jennings said. "It's just out of gas."
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