Premier Healthcare chosen to buy Washington County Health Center
Pat Cloonan|Herald-Standard
Washington County has chosen Premier Healthcare Management LLC as its preferred buyer for its nursing home, located near the county fairgrounds three miles north of the courthouse in suburban Washington and pictured in this photo. The county is hoping to complete a sale by Oct. 1.
Pat Cloonan|Herald-Standard
Washington County Commissioners (from left) Diana Irey Vaughan, Larry Maggi and Harlan G. Shober Jr. are pictured after their votes Thursday to accept Premier Healthcare Management LLC as their choice for negotiations regarding privatization of the county’s nursing home.
WASHINGTON – The Washington County board of commissioners voted Thursday morning to accept the bid of Premier Healthcare Management LLC for negotiations that should lead by Oct. 1 to a $26.8 million turnover of the Washington County Health Center to private hands.
Premier is a family-run company with offices in Great Neck, N.Y., and Philadelphia, that owns 23 nursing care facilities in the Northeast and Florida, including centers in Philadelphia, Whitemarsh, Reading, Schuylkill Haven and Butler in Pennsylvania.
Premier also agreed in January to purchase the Armstrong County Health Center in Kittanning for $5.85 million.
“We vowed that keeping and enhancing the Health Center’s high quality of care would be our top priority,” county board Chairman Larry Maggi said. “And we believe that Premier will deliver on that pledge.”
“Of the choices, it appears this is the better one,” said Kathy Shaner, an employee at WCHC and a member of the executive board of the Service Employees International Union’s Healthcare Pennsylvania unit.
That union represents 250 employees at the center located for more than four decades at a site three miles from the Washington County courthouse. SEIU, as Local 585 in ite earlier days and Healthcare PA more recently, has had contracts with the county for WCHC employees for more than 30 years.
“I am hopeful that this company is as dedicated to the residents in those beds as we have always been,” said Dawn Futrell, for the past three years an internal organizer for SEIU Healthcare Pennsylvania.
Premier was one of six companies that filed timely “Requests for Qualifications and Proposals” with the county.
The others were Grane Associates LP of suburban Pittsburgh; Comprehensive Healthcare Management Services Group of Hewlett, N.Y.; SolaMed Inc. of Brooklyn, N.Y.; Homestead Group of New Jersey LLC in Newton, N.J.; and Stone Barn Holdings of Amelia Island, Fla.
Grane withdrew from consideration and a committee of county officials, WCHC family members, employees and others toured facilities owned by Premier, Comprehensive and SolaMed.
Premier had the middle bid of the three finalists, with Comprehensive offering $23 million and SolaMed $28.2 million, but Premier also offered to accept all Health Center employees – and has unionized employees at 15 or its 23 existing centers.
“The company is strong financially,” said attorney Mark Stewart, a partner in the Pittsburgh office of Eckert Seamans which oversaw the process of bringing in proposals for the sale of the 280-bed senior care facility in Chartiers Township. “They have solid investors.”
As displayed with signs and concerned statements at commissioners’ meetings in recent months, the union did not want the county to sell the nursing home, suggesting that there were ways to cut costs and raise needed revenue without a sale, and in a way that would maintain what Stewart described as “the county’s high quality of care.”
As he narrated a PowerPoint presentation Stewart said the committee probing would-be buyers reviewed hard data, and did not rely simply on presentations from proposers.
SEIU has crossed swords with some of those proposers during other transitions of health care centers from county operation to private hands, such as one in Beaver County.
Still, the decision Thursday came with little discord.
“You showed us the heart you have for the people you serve,” Commissioner Diana Irey Vaughan told WCHC staffers after Thursday’s meeting.