Dead Certain

three to two in favor of selling the hospital.”
    Mother waited in silence as I grappled with the news. I’m sure she was pleased not only to have caught me off guard, but to have finally captured my complete attention.
    “To whom?” I demanded, when finally I managed to find my voice.
    “Some company named Health Care Corporation of America that’s apparently going around the country buying up hospitals.”
    I leaned back in my chair and considered what I knew about Health Care Corporation, which wasn’t much. HCC was one of those companies that was much admired on Wall Street but reviled nearly everywhere else. They’d burst onto the scene a couple of years ago declaring themselves the messiahs of for-profit medicine and began making money hand over fist.
    “Can they really do that?” I demanded, still trying to master my disbelief.
    “Do what?”
    “Can they vote to sell the hospital just like that?”
    “They not only can,” replied my mother, “but they did. As soon as the motion passed we signed the papers.” She brushed a piece of imaginary lint from her sleeve. “Four generations of philanthropy sold off like it was so much old furniture.”
    “What exactly did you sign?” I inquired, ever the lawyer.
    “Only a letter of intent and a confidentiality agreement,” she replied, as if these were documents that routinely passed through her hands. “The sale itself won’t go through for another ten days.”
    “I can’t believe the trustees would vote to sell,” I muttered incredulously. Over the years the hospital’s board had been deliberately kept small—just five seats. Two were held by family members—my mother and her younger brother Edwin—while the other three board members were individuals with close ties to both the family and the hospital. They were Kyle Massius, the president of the hospital; Carl Laffer, Prescott Memorial’s chief of staff; and Gavin McDermott, the hospital’s world-renowned chief of surgery. All were lifelong friends of the family.
    “Naturally, Edwin and I tried everything we could think of to persuade them not to do this,” continued my mother. “But we might as well have been talking to ourselves.”
    My mother was a very bright woman, but she was so used to getting her way as a matter of course that I wasn’t sure if she could have persuaded a stranger to give her a glass of water if she were dying of thirst. On the other hand, just the thought of Uncle Edwin attempting any kind of higher level mental function was enough to give me chest pains. Edwin was a handsome ne’er-do-well who owed his board seat to the accident of his birth and the family’s desire to give him something to do. His only talent, as far as I could tell, was for bad marriages and even worse divorces.
    “But why? What reasons did they give that could possibly justify selling the hospital?”
    “Oh, it was just all the usual rubbish about the hospital losing money and the skyrocketing cost of medical care,” replied Mother. For once I thought her right to be dismissive. Money was always short at a charity hospital, and there would always be more patients than beds at an institution that didn’t turn away people who could not pay. “Kyle Massius actually had the nerve to sit there and lecture me on the realities of the marketplace,” she continued in a tone of voice that indicated that if he’d ordered her to get up on the table and perform a striptease, she would have been no less offended.
    “So who gets the money?” I asked, wondering about the mechanics of buying and selling something that wasn’t actually owned by anyone.
    “The foundation will get the proceeds from the sale,” Mother reported.
    The Prescott Foundation was a family vehicle, an organization nominally headed by Edwin that existed primarily on paper. Through it, family funds were channeled to charitable causes.
    Out of the corner of my eye I caught sight of Cheryl standing in the hall tapping the face of her watch to indicate that it was time to get back into the conference room.
    “Well, I’m sure the family will have to put some serious thought into how best to redirect the money,” I ventured, wondering how on earth I was going to manage to finesse my mother out of my office.
    “I did not come here to discuss the relative merits of worthwhile causes,” snapped Mother. “Prescott Memorial is not one of these companies that you seem to spend all your time buying and selling. It happens to