CarePoint Health has no shortage of legal battles with local rivals. But that hasn’t stopped the Hudson County hospital chain from opening up a new one against a major player in the state’s healthcare industry.
The operator of hospitals in Hoboken, Bayonne and Jersey City sued competitor RWJBarnabas Health, the operator of Jersey City Medical Center, alleging it sought to eliminate CarePoint as a competitor by forcing it to close two of its hospitals and sell the third. The lawsuit, filed Tuesday, was first reported by NJ Spotlight News.
The 69-page antitrust lawsuit crafts an elaborate narrative of a neighbor uninterested in competing fairly with CarePoint and instead intent on systemically overtaking it and driving it into bankruptcy. The suit claims maneuvers by RWJBarnabas cost CarePoint Health hundred of millions of dollars.
RWJBarnabas said the lawsuit’s allegations are unfounded.
“This is yet another in a series of baseless complaints filed by CarePoint, an organization whose leadership apparently prefers to assign blame to others rather than accept responsibility for the unsatisfactory results of their own poor business decisions and actions over the years,” an RWJBarnabas Health spokesperson said.
CarePoint already has active lawsuits with Secaucus-based Hudson Regional Hospital and the Hoboken Municipal Hospital Authority.
Despite a troubled financial history and announcements before the pandemic that it planned to transition the hospitals to new operators, it is doubling down on an intent to stay while newly operating as a non-profit network.
In the lawsuit filed Tuesday, CarePoint alleges that RWJBarnabas strategically had ambulances direct patients to Jersey City Medical Center as a means of gaining more affluent, insured patients. CarePoint says it loses $227 million “as a result of JCMC’s patient redirecting, diverting and/or steering.”
It says RWJBarnabas only ever signed an intent to purchase Christ Hospital as a means of gaining insider information and that it spread rumors that the hospital was going to close. Those rumors caused employees of both Christ Hospital and Hoboken University Medical Center (HUMC) to leave, CarePoint says, requiring the network to hire and pay nurses at three times the normal rate.
The lawsuit said the extra pay cost CarePoint Health an additional $20.1 million so far this year.
It paints RWJBarnabas as a conspirator with the Hoboken Municipal Hospital Authority (HMHA), which last year sought to begin a process of replacing CarePoint as the operator of its hospital via a short-lived call for interested hospital operators through a Request for Indications.
RWJBarnabas leadership “engaged with” the hospital authority and its contractor, Raymond James, before that document went out, the lawsuit says.
“This interaction with HMHA and Raymond James was calculated to devalue HUMC, and RWJ used insider information to assist HMHA and Raymond James on a plan of attack,” it says.
The lawsuit also alleges that RWJBarnabas Health used its influence with state lawmakers to ensure that CarePoint Health did not receive any the $293 million in American Rescue Plan funds awarded to New Jersey hospitals.
When asked to comment on the lawsuit, CarePoint said that it is engaging in new partnerships and moving forward after the COVID-19 pandemic, but its “competitors have continued to engage in selfish, coordinated, antagonistic attacks designed to further their goals of unfair domination of the county’s health care and real estate markets.”
Spokesman Phil Swibinski said, “CarePoint has earned the trust of Hudson County’s elected leaders and the community by starting its transition to a non-profit organization and becoming in-network with all major insurance carriers, and now it simply asks to be treated fairly with support for the community that needs these hospitals and without interference from vested interests that would leave residents without immediate access to care.”
Local leaders in at least one municipality are not happy with CarePoint’s conversion to a non-profit. Hoboken is working to get the HUMC property appraised, signaling that it is continuing with the hospital authority’s plan to oust CarePoint.