Hawaii Medical Center Hospitals to close

Community leaders were working Friday on plans to revive the Hawaii Medical Center hospitals in Liliha and Ewa after the owners said they will shutter the bankrupt facilities within three weeks.

Closing the former St. Francis medical centers, which date back to the 1920s, will leave 990 workers unemployed and eliminate more than 340 hospital beds.

The loss will be felt throughout the health community. HMC provides critical dialysis services to a significant portion of Oahu's renal patients and operates the only organ transplant center in the Pacific. The Ewa facility is the only full-service emergency hospital in West Oahu. The 150 patients in the two hospitals will have to be moved or discharged.

To prevent a public health emergency, the state administration is hopeful that buyers can be found to operate one or both of the facilities.

The situation appears dire for HMC's employees since many Oahu health care facilities won't likely be able to absorb the significant number of workers who will be left without jobs.

"I don't think there's any one health system here that could absorb all those workers," said HPH spokeswoman Shawn Nakamoto.

HMC had a brief glimmer of hope in recent weeks that it could stave off a shutdown when an affiliate of California-based Prime Healthcare Services offered to pay a minimum of $25 million for the facilities. However, the deal fell apart this week because St. Francis, the former owner of the hospitals which is owed $39 million by the current owner, objected to the offer, according to Prime. Prime's offer would have paid the Catholic religious order $11.3 million.

"The problem here was that St. Francis basically conveyed that they wouldn't support a sale unless we paid (them) off," said Prime's attorney Mark Bradshaw. "It's clearly about money for St. Francis. Given that the hospitals are not worth $40 million, it didn't make sense for anybody. We were basically discouraged from bidding."

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[1/5/12] Hawaii Medical Center said today it has closed its Liliha campus, after transferring the last few patients to area hospitals and long-term care facilities late Wednesday.

"With the cessation of patient care, HMC will lay off a significant majority of its nearly 1,000 employees by this weekend," said Maria Kostylo, HMC's CEO. "Today is a sad day for all of us at Hawaii Medical Center. We've been a part of the community for 85 years, first as St. Francis Medical Center and then as Hawaii Medical Center. Despite our many challenges in recent years, the employees of HMC never wavered in their commitment to provide quality care for patients."

Hawaii Medical Center's Ewa hospital shut down last week after transferring the last of its patients to the Liliha campus. The hospital said it had a difficult time placing its last remaining patients with complex, chronic medical conditions that require long-term care, which is scarce in the community.

HMC's administration and billing departments will remain open as the hospitals wind down business operations.

*** [2/10/12]

House Health Committee lawmakers advanced today two measures intended to help St. Francis Healthcare System of Hawaii reopen the now defunct Hawaii Medical Centers.

The first, House Bill 2345, would provide St. Francis up to $80 million in special-purpose revenue bonds to renovate the HMC-West and HMC-East campuses and "reopen the now-closed hospital in Ewa Beach," said state Rep. Rida Cabanilla (D, Waipahu-Honouliuli-West Loch-Ewa), who introduced the measure.

Meanwhile, the committee passed another measure, House Bill 609, which would allow the public hospital system known as Hawaii Health Systems Corp. to negotiate with St. Francis to operate Liliha's HMC-East facility.

Both bills now head to the House Finance Committee.

The Franciscan sisters sold the hospitals in January 2007 for $68 million to HMC LLC, then a for-profit joint venture between Hawaii Physician Group LLC, composed of 130 local doctors, and Kansas-based Cardiovascular Hospitals of America. St. Francis provided the bulk of the financing for the sale, $40.2 million.

HMC first filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in August 2008. It emerged in August 2010 and became a nonprofit organization before filing its second bankruptcy in June. HMC began closing the hospitals in December.

*** [5/17/12]

The effort by St. Francis Healthcare System of Hawaii to sell two shuttered medical facilities on Oahu that it recently took back in bankruptcy has attracted an offer from a partnership led by someone very familiar with the properties in Liliha and Ewa.

Eugene Tiwanak, a former St. Francis official, is leading a bid to buy the two former Hawaii Medical Center hospitals in partnership with a San Francisco-based physicians group, Hampton Health Ltd.

Tiwanak’s group hand-delivered a letter of intent Tuesday to St. Francis, offering to buy and reopen both facilities. A proposed purchase price was included but isn’t being made public. The partnership said it has necessary financing from investors to complete the acquisition.

The offer follows an expression of intent announced last week by the parent company of The Queen’s Medical Center to explore the feasibility of reopening the Ewa hospital.

Separately, the state’s Hawaii Health Systems Corp. won legislative approval earlier this month to buy the Liliha facility, though there haven’t been discussions with St. Francis and no funds were appropriated for such an acquisition.

Kim Jong-il

North Korean leader Kim Jong-il has died of a heart attack at the age of 69, state media have announced.

Millions of North Koreans were "engulfed in indescribable sadness", the KCNA state news agency said, as people wept openly in Pyongyang.

KNCA described one of his sons, Kim Jong-un, as the "great successor" whom North Koreans should unite behind.

Pyongyang's neighbours are on alert amid fears of instability in the poor and isolated nuclear-armed nation.

Fears were compounded by unconfirmed reports from South Korean news agency Yonhap that the North had test-fired a missile off its eastern coast before the announcement of Kim Jong-il's death was made.

Unnamed government officials in Seoul were quoted as saying they did not believe the launch was linked to the announcement. The South Korean defence ministry has declined to comment.

Following news of Mr Kim's death, South Korea put its armed forces on high alert and said the country was on a crisis footing. Japan's government convened a special security meeting.

China - North Korea's closest ally and biggest trading partner - expressed shock at the news of his death and pledged to continue making "active contributions to peace and stability on the Korean peninsula and in this region".

taxing the rich

Despite the flaws in the parties' strategies -- Democrats always reach first to tax the rich and Republicans always rush to protect them even at the expense of everyone else -- each contains a bit of truth the other side will have to accept sooner or later.

Both the rich and the middle class eventually will have to contribute to efforts to spur the economy and stabilize the federal budget.

"Democrats today can't solve our nation's many budgetary woes primarily by taxing the rich, and Republicans risk alienating the middle class when they try to spare the rich from sharing the additional burdens most Americans soon must bear," former Treasury official Eugene Steuerle wrote in his public policy column "The Government We Deserve."

The rich will have to pay more in taxes, he notes, because even if spending is cut across the board, they won't feel the pinch since they don't rely on government spending to get by.

And the middle class will eventually need to accept some spending cuts and tax increases, Steuerle said, "not because the rich can't pay more, but because most income in the economy resides with that 80 percent of the population that is neither poor nor rich."

War in Iraq declared over

AGHDAD >> There was no "Mission Accomplished" banner. No victory parade down the center of this capital scarred and rearranged by nearly nine years of war. No crowds of cheering Iraqis grateful for liberation from Saddam Hussein.

Instead, the U.S. military officially declared an end to its mission in Iraq on Thursday with a businesslike closing ceremony behind blast walls in a fortified compound at Baghdad airport. The flag used by U.S. forces in Iraq was lowered and boxed up in a 45-minute ceremony. No senior Iraqi political figures attended.

With that, and brief words from top American officials who flew in under tight security still necessary because of the ongoing violence in Iraq, the U.S. drew the curtain on a war that left 4,500 Americans and more than 100,000 Iraqis dead.

The conflict also left another 32,000 Americans and far more Iraqis wounded, drained more than $800 billion from America's treasury and soured a majority of Americans on a war many initially supported as a just extension of the fight against terrorism after the 9/11 attacks.

As the last troops withdraw from Iraq, they leave behind a nation free of Saddam's tyranny but fractured by violence and fearful of the future. Bombings and gun battles are still common. And experts are concerned about the Iraqi security forces' ability to defend the nation against foreign threats.

"You will leave with great pride — lasting pride," Defense Secretary Leon Panetta told the troops seated in front of a small domed building in the airport complex. "Secure in knowing that your sacrifice has helped the Iraqi people to begin a new chapter in history."

Many Iraqis, however, are uncertain of how that chapter will unfold. Their relief at the end of Saddam, who was hanged on the last day of 2006, was tempered by a long and vicious war that was launched to find non-existent weapons of mass destruction and nearly plunged the nation into full-scale sectarian civil war.

"With this withdrawal, the Americans are leaving behind a destroyed country," said Mariam Khazim, a Shiite whose father was killed when a mortar shell struck his home in Sadr City. "The Americans did not leave modern schools or big factories behind them. Instead, they left thousands of widows and orphans. The Americans did not leave a free people and country behind them, in fact they left a ruined country and a divided nation."

Some Iraqis celebrated the exit of what they called American occupiers, neither invited not welcome in a proud country.