Mid-Columbia Medical Center, in The Dalles, Oregon, plans to be acquired by California-based Adventist Health, a 23-hospital chain that owns, among many others, White Memorial Hospital in east Los Angeles, what was once the Sanitarium in Glendale, and Castle Memorial Hospital, in Honolulu, Hawaii. Adventist Health is promising to spend $100 million over the next decade upgrading Mid-Columbia’s outdated facilities, parts of which were built in 1959.
Mid-Columbia, a secular, non-religious institution, and Adventist Health, a faith-based system affiliated with the Seventh-day Adventist Church, have jointly applied to the Oregon Health Authority for approval under the state’s new Health Care Market Oversight program.
The proposed merger is the first to be reviewed under Oregon’s Market Oversight Program, which legislators created two years ago, in part because they feared that the expansion of faith-based systems would curtail the availability of abortion. (Oregon is a Democrat-controlled, pro-abortion jurisdiction and, because it has adopted a universal mail-out/mail-in balloting system, will remain firmly in Leftist control until such time as it, and/or the United States, ceases to exist.)
Although, according to its official statement, the Seventh-day Adventist Church opposes abortion except in very rare instances, such as when the unborn child has Trisomy-21 (“Down Syndrome”), Adventist Health said it would not require Mid-Columbia to change any of its current “reproductive” services, presumably including abortion.
The Oregon program reviewing mergers and acquisitions seeks to ensure that mergers do not reduce services or patient access, or increase costs. Mid-Columbia and Adventist Health both said that their planned merger satisfies all the state criteria.
“Mid-Columbia will continue to make the full range of reproductive services available to patients, since Adventist Health imposes no religious-based restrictions on medical procedures and services,” the application notes.
Adventist Health does not “intervene in decision-making around women’s reproductive services,” Adventist spokesperson Japhet De Oliveira stated in an email. “Rarely, medical and surgical pregnancy terminations are necessary in our hospitals.”
Mid-Columbia Medical Center sought a suitor to acquire it because of its serious financial problems. But Adventist Health, although loaded with cash, recently has had profitability issues of its own. The Fitch bond rating service noted that Adventist Health recorded a $254 million operating loss on revenues of $3.9 billion through the first three quarters of 2022. “This marks the fourth consecutive year the system will record a loss from operations,” Fitch noted. But Fitch kept Adventist Health’s bond rating at A on the AAA through D scale, because Adventist Health has a net worth — assets minus liabilities — of $2.5 billion, including an investment portfolio of $1.7 billion.