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Home > NEWS > Email from the President > ECMC-Kaleida

ECMC-Kaleida Consolidation: Let's finish the task
June 11, 2008
 
At the Partnership board of directors meeting on May 27, the following resolution was overwhelmingly approved:

RESOLVED, that the Partnership supports completion of the process of consolidating the operations of Kaleida and ECMC under a single management company (Newco) and urges state elected and appointed officials to take all actions necessary to implement such consolidation, including the submittal of necessary state legislation as soon as possible.

The Partnership's strong and active support for the long overdue reengineering of this region's hospitals is not at all new. In fact, going back 20 years to our Greater Buffalo Development Foundation (GBDF) days, we undertook several initiatives to realign clinical programs, primarily to create "centers of excellence" in specific areas of care and to control health care costs. In addition, we formed a separate organization to bring together the principals in regional health care delivery to try to agree on ways to improve the quality, cost, and accessibility of health care in the region; and to provide objective measures of the delivery of them.

Those and subsequent locally led attempts to reengineer Buffalo Niagara's health care system were not successful; in each instance, one or more vested interests got in the way. In the meantime, and in the midst of our particular regional economic and demographic trends, the quality of our health care has dropped to a level of real concern, there is a diminishing pool of physicians (especially in key/needed specialties), our health insurance premiums continue to rise significantly, and our hospitals continue to have insufficient resources to reinvest in people and technology.

It's precisely because of this scenario - the cost and quality of our health care demands change, but any/all locally led initiatives for such change have failed - that the Partnership welcomed the state's Berger Commission approach to achieving health care system reengineering, supported the specific recommendations of the Berger Commission, and have lobbied for obtaining the funds available to support the implementation of the reengineering specifics.

So, in this context, the Partnership board's May 27 resolution is no surprise. And last week the Paterson administration did, in fact, submit the necessary state legislation (click here for a summary of it) which if passed will greatly facilitate the completion of the ECMC-Kaleida consolidation. Our WNY state delegation is key for moving along this legislation prior to the Berger Commission's June 30 deadline for such progress. If that deadline passes without such progress, $250 million of available state and federal funds for this mandated reengineering will no longer be available; that would not only make the consolidation financially infeasible, more importantly, it would eliminate the primary benefit of it - improved health care in Buffalo Niagara.

Please send a message to the members of the WNY delegation urging them - for the sake of the health care, now and into the future, available to the citizens of Buffalo Niagara - to act on the ECMC-Kaleida proposed legislation before June 30, 2008. All the current acrimony, accusations and lawsuits by the local vested interests reinforce the need for such outside intervention now.

P.S. For an excellent description of the ECMC-Kaleida consolidation dispute, click here to read Mike Vogel's piece on it in the June 1 Buffalo News.


Andrew J. Rudnick