North Carolina’s attorney general alleges in a new lawsuit that HCA Healthcare is violating the terms of the agreement that allowed it to buy Mission Health, a formerly nonprofit health system.
In the complaint filed Thursday, Attorney General Josh Stein said HCA, the country’s largest for-profit hospital chain, is not providing the quality, consistent emergency and cancer care that it committed to delivering across Mission’s six western North Carolina hospitals. Stein, whose office has fielded more than 500 complaints about Mission since HCA took over, formally declared in October that HCA violated the agreement. At that time, he threatened to sue if HCA did not correct the lapses.
“For-profit HCA has broken its promise to the people of western North Carolina and to my office,” Stein said in a statement. “Quality health care is too important — in some cases, a matter of life and death. But HCA apparently cares more about its profits than its patients.”
The lawsuit follows a STAT investigation into the problems that have erupted at Mission since HCA took over in 2019. Ten current and former Mission doctors told STAT the conditions at Mission Hospital, Mission’s main hospital in Asheville, have become unsafe because so many workers have left, driven away by unsafe environments, tough working conditions, and low pay.
Stein’s lawsuit claims that Mission Hospital no longer meets the standards of a level II trauma center because it’s not providing the necessary emergency and trauma care. For example, best practices are for each nurse to be assigned four patients in the emergency room and two patients in the intensive care unit. The lawsuit says Mission Hospital regularly exceeds that.
With respect to cancer care, Stein notes that Mission does not employ any medical oncologists, whereas it employed five in 2021. The doctors left because they were burned out and did not have adequate staffing support. One of those oncologists who spoke anonymously told STAT, “I couldn’t in good faith take care of patients somewhere that I didn’t think was safe.”
Stein’s lawsuit, filed in Buncombe County Superior Court, asks the court to declare that HCA has breached its asset purchase agreement, issue a permanent injunction to restrain HCA from committing such breaches, and require HCA to provide emergency and cancer services at the level they were prior to 2019.
HCA did not immediately comment on the lawsuit.