Hospitals fight plan for N.J. center
The Journal News — Rockland County
Sunday, November 16, 2008
BY JANE LERNER
WESTWOOD, N.J. - Leaders of both of Rockland’s acute-care hospitals are opposing a plan for a new for-profit facility just over the county line in Bergen County, N.J., where Pascack Valley Hospital operated until it went bankrupt a year ago.
Both David Freed, chief of Nyack Hospital, and Michael Schnieders, executive vice president of Good Samaritan Hospital in Suffern, have written to New Jersey officials urging them not to approve a plan by Hackensack University Medical Center and a private Texas company to open a new, for-profit hospital at the Pascack location.
Both maintain that a new, 128-bed hospital just miles from the Rockland border is unnecessary and will make it harder for the Rockland hospitals and other area facilities to provide care in an increasingly difficult and competitive financial environment.
“I strongly believe that patients are not well served by opening a new hospital in Westwood,” Freed wrote in his letter to the New Jersey health commissioner. “It will only exacerbate the regional oversupply of hospitals and hospital beds and, in turn, negatively affect the quality of health care delivery throughout Bergen and Rockland counties.”
In its plan submitted to New Jersey regulators, Hackensack denies that its plans for a new hospital will have an impact on other hospitals competing for the same patients.
The new hospital, “will serve the 14 communities immediately surrounding the hospital, while at the same time ensuring that there will be no negative impact on other existing hospitals in Bergen County,” Hackensack wrote in its application to the New Jersey Department of Health and Senior Services.
Hackensack said that its joint venture with Legacy Hospital Partners of Plano, Texas, will enable the new hospital to be run without any public funding.
In documents, Hackensack said it will be able to make a financial success of the proposed hospital and maintains that the old Pascack Valley Hospital went out of business because of poor management and overexpansion.
