Seven big players in a fluctuating field

National Catholic Reporter, June 16, 1995

Mercy Health Services (MHS)

This Farmington Hills, Mich.,-based system under the sponsorship of the Sisters of Mercy, operates eight health service subsidiary corporations in five states: Maryland, Ohio, Indiana, Idaho and California, and a community services organization in Utah.

Total beds: 4,751

Patient discharges: 162,704

Free or below-cost care: $46 million (June 30, 1994)

Charity care as a percentage of revenues: 2.7 percent

Tax-exempt bond financed debt: $541 million

Financial (as of June 30, 1994)

Net income: $94.7 million

Net revenues: $2.03 billion

Unrestricted fund balance: $654 million

In 1989, the Marian Health Center in Sioux City, Iowa, began a "Light a Child's Life" program for the child victims of sexual abuse and their families.

Through art and play therapy, some 200-300 children, ages 4 to 12, are annually being helped by a multifaceted outpatient program of group and family therapy and parent education. The range of Mercy Health Services'" population at risk" programs goes from "Freedom from Smoking" classes in Muskegon, Mich., to transportation programs for seniors and indigents at St. Joseph Mercy Hospital in Mt. Clemens, Mich.

Through "community health care systems," primarily in Iowa and Michigan, the outreach includes acute and ambulatory care services for the aging, home care, hospice care and managed care services.

Daughters of Charity National Health System

Currently the largest Catholic health care system. Based in St. Louis, it was unified in 1986.

Total beds: 16,388

Total patient admissions: 450,000

Closings: Fort Worth, texas, and New Orleans in recent years.

Charity care: $250 million-plus

Tax-exempt bond financed debt: Close to $1 billion

Financial

Net income: n/a

Net revenues: $3.9 billion (1993, MHC)

Unrestricted fund balance (net worth): $3 billion

When the Daughters of Charity sold their New Orleans hospital to the state of Louisiana a couple of years ago, that ended the order's health care relationship with the city. But not necessarily forever, said Jerry P. Widman, senior vice president for finance of the Daughters of Charity National Health System, or DCNHS.

Frequently, he said, if Catholic systems step away from the large institutional obligations, such as hospitals, they begin again in the same area. But smaller. So, for example, years ago, DCNHS sold an El Paso, Texas, hospital. Several years later, he said, the Daughters returned, opening clinics in El Paso, health care again, but in a different setting. "We don't abandon the community," said Widman, intimating that at some point New Orleans will see a reemergence of DCNHS in a new guise.

In some communities, DCNHS shows its persistence by staying to serve the poorer community through hospitals, however. DCNHS, a coast-to-coast system, had social/medical outreach galore, from sharing in children's parties in the Mobile, Ala., St. Mary's Home, to an Interfaith Homes partnership in Indianapolis aimed at reducing the city's high infant mortality rate.

The system also has three hospitals "that are neck and neck in terms of what they do for the poor," said Widman, "St. Francis in south-central L.A. (Lynwood), St. Mary's in Rochester, N.Y., and Providence Hospital in Washington, D.C. St. Francis Medical Center has more emergency-room visits than any other hospital in L.A. -- except for the county hospitals," he said.

Sisters of Charity of Leavenworth Health Services Corp. (SCL/HSC).

This system, under the sponsorship of the Sisters of Charity of Leavenworth, Kan., operates eight hospitals in four states: Kansas, Colorado, Montana and California.

Total beds: 2,726

Total patients: 100,000 admissions

Free or below-cost care: $21 million

Charity care as a percentage of revenues: 2 percent.

Financial (1993, MHC)

Net income: $43.3 million

Operating revenue: $736 million

Unrestricted fund balance: $608 million

The fee is "$10 if" at the St. Vincent primary care clinic at the corner of Leavenworth's Fifth and Walnut streets -- "$10 if they can afford to pay," said director Sr. Ann McGuire. Otherwise, services are free -- an enormous benefit to the 27,000 poor people who have used St. Vincent since it opened.

The clinic, affiliated with the Sisters of Charity of Leavenworth health Services Corp. through their Caritas clinic network, serves mainly adults, the working poor and the unemployed, those uninsured and at or below 150 percent of the federal poverty guidelines.

Because Kansas covers poor children through Medicare-Medicaid, the few children who seek services of the clinic are those of parents who choose not to go on welfare. All the doctors in Leavenworth will see St. Vincent patients on a referral basis "at a low fee or no fee," said McGuire.

"Nurses volunteer (to help the midlevel practitioner, a physician's assistant) and we have a platoon of clerical volunteers." Donors are kept connected through a four-times-a-year newsletter, which comes with an envelope; United Way contributes to the operations, and the sisters' health system subsidizes through health services and employee insurance at St. Vincent and similar clinics in Grand Junction, Colo.; Kansas City, Kan.; and Topeka, Kan.