Bacon's Rebellion

by James C. Sherlock

I have been studying and writing about Sentara Healthcare for 15 years. Sentara has during that time both expanded significantly and been mired in seemingly endless controversies regarding such widely reported issues as:

• its death grip on the COPN process and business practices, which together have strangled their much weaker competitors in Hampton Roads;
• its captive HMO Optima Health, which in 2018 raised ACA Individual Policy rates to the nation’s highest in Charlottesville and Albemarle County when Anthem pulled out of that market for a year and left Optima offering policies on the exchange. The severe financial distress to individual policyholders made headlines all over the state;
• the ongoing reporting of conflicts of interests by a Circuit Court judge who had served as a Sentara attorney before sitting and ruling in favor of Sentara;
• fierce pressure applied in the courts on people who could not pay their medical bills before the publicity and subsequent state and federal pressure effectively stopped it;
• a senior Sentara executive threatening political retribution against a member of the Virginia Senate;
• secret negotiations among Sentara, ODU, and a powerful group of businessmen in Hampton Roads to dump Eastern Virginia Medical School (EVMS) onto the taxpayers and take its profitable physicians practices; and
• other headlines too often reporting unseemly activities.

Those issues indicate poor executive leadership, ineffective board governance and a toxic culture.

I recently completed a private study of the corporate architecture of Sentara to see what might be in its DNA that produces such results. Consider this an analyst’s note to shareholders, the public served by Sentara. (more…)