Henry Ford Health and Ascension Michigan officially launched the start of their “joint venture” on Tuesday, creating a single system with 13 acute care hospitals, 550 sites of care, and 50,000 employees in the southeast Michigan and Flint areas.
“We know what an incredible privilege our healthcare mission is – and today I join our 50,000 amazing team members in taking a monumental leap forward for those we serve,” said Bob Riney, president and CEO of Henry Ford Health, in a statement. “From Detroit to Grand Blanc, from Jackson to Southfield, from Macomb to our Downriver communities, and everything in between, we’re committed to making the impossible, possible – everyday – for those we serve.”
Here’s what you need to know about how the deal will impact patients, prices, employees, and options for reproductive care in the region.
Which hospitals are part of the deal?
Under the move, seven formerly-Ascension hospitals and their related sites will be rebranded and renamed under the Henry Ford Health banner, including:
Ascension Genesys Hospital
now Henry Ford Genesys Hospital
Ascension Macomb-Oakland Hospital, Warren & Madison Heights campuses
now Henry Ford Warren Hospital Henry Ford Madison Heights Hospital
Ascension Providence Hospital, Novi & Southfield campuses
Henry Ford Providence Novi Hospital Henry Ford Providence Southfield Hospital
Ascension Providence Rochester Hospital
now Henry Ford Rochester Hospital
Ascension River District Hospital
now Henry Ford River District Hospital
Ascension St. John Hospital
now Henry Ford St. John Hospital
Ascension Brighton Center for Recovery
now Henry Ford Brighton Center for Recovery
Henry Ford Health will be the majority owner in the joint venture, according to the health system, with an 80% ownership and governance stake, while Ascension will maintain a 20% stake.
What does this mean for patients in terms of cost and quality of care?
As the U.S. health system increasingly consolidates, there’s a lot of research that shows this consolidation can lead to higher costs for consumers. (The record on how consolidation impacts the quality and accessibility of patient care is more mixed.)
But at a press conference Tuesday, Riney said he doesn’t “anticipate that there will be significant increases" in costs for patients.
Instead, Riney said, patients will have more options as the health systems combine. “This coming-together for consumers offers a lot of options for people to know that they can get their care, and their care will be highly connected. And that they can have a team of clinicians that can provide second opinions, if there is a particular area of expertise in one area or the other. So I think consumers are the real beneficiary of this moving forward together.”
“I think people are going to see value added,” he added. “Value comes from coordination, and value comes from eliminating waste and adopting best practices, including adoption of technology like Epic and our electronic medical record.”
But experts say that costs often do go up after health systems combine.
“Without a doubt, mergers reduce competition,” said Dr. Rachel Werner, a professor of medicine and the executive director of the University of Pennsylvania’s Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics. “And if there's one thing we know for certain is that when competition within a health care market is reduced by hospital mergers, prices go up.”
Michigan has seen a flurry of consolidation in recent years. In 2022, Beaumont Health and Spectrum Health merged to become Michigan’s largest health system, now called Corewell Health, with a combined 21 hospitals, 300 locations and some 65,000 team members. In 2023, The University of Michigan’s Michigan Medicine and Lansing-based Sparrow Health System also merged. And DMC, which operates Sinai Grace Hospital and Harper University Hospital, among others, became part of Vanguard Health Systems Inc. in 2010, which was in turn acquired by Tenet Healthcare Corporation in 2013.
“There have been literally thousands of hospital mergers across the country, and in almost every case, and I'm talking 99% of the cases, this ends up costing patients in dollars,” said Bret Jackson, president and CEO of the Economic Alliance for Michigan. “They're going to pay more in premiums … [and their] co-pay or co-insurance will also go up as a result. So it's going to hit them in the pocketbook directly every time they access care, and then it's going to hit them on their paycheck as they're paying part of that premium.”
Ascension, meanwhile, has been unloading hospitals left and right in several states as it faces operating losses, including recently selling hospitals, care sites and physician groups in three northern Michigan communities to MyMichigan Health (which itself is part of the University of Michigan health system).
It’s possible, Werner said, that a merger could save hospitals that would otherwise have to close due to financial problems.
“Theoretically, the acquisition of a small, financially-struggling hospital by a large health care system could stabilize that hospital, and that might be really good for patients,” she said. “It could provide the hospital with access to needed expertise, needed money, needed resources, which could keep the hospital's doors open.”
What does this mean for staff? Will any hospitals be closing?
“We do not plan any layoffs,” Riney said on Monday. “We are a growing organization. More and more patients and community members are finding that they align very well with the care and services offered by Henry Ford Health. And secondly, I am so, so happy that literally 99-point-something percent of all Ascension team members that were offered positions at Henry Ford Health accepted. That's an extraordinary vote of confidence in what this new enterprise can do together.”
Asked whether Henry Ford Health would honor contract agreements that unionized Ascension employees had, Riney said they would.
“I can tell you unequivocally that union contracts will be honored. You know, we have some union organizations within Henry Ford and there are some within Ascension. I certainly enjoy and believe that we have to earn the right to have direct relationships with all of our team members, but we honor and respect those that choose to use a third party, and that will not change.”
Will the former Ascension sites remain Catholic health systems? What does that mean for reproductive health access?
Yes, the Ascension Michigan and Genesys hospitals and facilities that were Catholic “will maintain their Catholic identity,” the health system said in a statement. That means those hospitals may restrict what types of reproductive care patients can receive, from birth control to abortion care, even in an emergency like a miscarriage.
“The [Catholic Ethical and Religious] Directives prohibit a range of reproductive health services, including contraception, sterilization, many infertility treatments, and abortion, even when a woman’s life or health is jeopardized by a pregnancy,” according to a ACLU and MergerWatch report in 2016. “Because of these rules, many Catholic hospitals across this country are withholding emergency care from patients who are in the midst of a miscarriage or experiencing other pregnancy complications.”
In practice, however, “there is significant diversity of practice within Catholic hospitals due to a lack of uniform interpretation or application of these directives,” according to the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists.
But when repeatedly asked which types of reproductive healthcare would not be available at the formerly-Ascension, now-Henry Ford Health hospitals, administrators and spokespeople did not provide specifics.
“We can get that out in a statement for all of you,” Carol Schmidt, the senior vice president of ascension (who will now serve as senior integration advisor at Henry Ford Health), said at Monday’s press conference. “The same care that we provided before, the services that we provided will continue to be provided.”
But a spokesperson for Henry Ford Health declined to give those specifics. “The simplest answer is that nothing is changing; each care site is providing the same care it did before the joint venture. The directives remain at the Catholic sites, and the care offered at Henry Ford Health legacy sites also remains the same.”
Patients who need care that isn’t provided at Catholic hospitals will be transferred to the other Henry Ford Health hospitals that do provide those types of care, Schmidt said. “If someone requested services that legacy Ascension did not provide, we would make sure that that patient's wishes were granted and help them to make a transfer, do whatever is in their best interest according to their desires.”
Asked about patients who, during a miscarriage, may not realize that a hospital with the Henry Ford Health name on it was actually a Catholic hospital, Riney said that information would be clearly listed on the health system’s website.
“I look at this as another level of diversity, which we all embrace,” he said. “I think that within the Henry Ford family, we can have services that are offered in certain sites, and services that are not offered in sites because of a religious belief,” he said. “And I think that while that might be viewed as conflicting to people, I actually think it's another level of embracing diversity that you can have differences within the umbrella of one organization, one family.”
