DETROIT (WXYZ) — Karmanos alleges DMC threatened to cut or reduce essential daily support services critical for delivering continuous patient care, restricted the cancer hospital's efforts to build new facilities and expand patient programs, and implemented unjustified service cost hikes.
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Brian Gamble, president and CEO of Karmanos Cancer Hospital, said the lawsuit is a preemptive effort to bring DMC and Tenet to the table to resolve a longstanding contractual dispute.
"Recently Tenet and DMC threatened to terminate basic functions if Karmanos did not pay the arbitrarily determined amounts. They have recalculated amounts using non-contract calculations that have resulted in higher amounts due than what we've paid historically," Gamble said.
"We took this action as a preemptive action. To preserve and protect our patients to the high quality cancer care that they deserve from us on a daily basis," Gamble said.
When Karmanos separated from DMC in 2005, it entered an agreement to remain on the medical center's Detroit campus and purchase essential support services from DMC.
Gamble says Karmanos has for years worked in good faith to resolve its concerns regarding service levels, costs and delivery of essential services to no avail.
"For a cancer center caring for patients with complex and life altering diagnoses, the threat of disruption of essential services is not simply a business disagreement, it is a patient care issue," Gamble said.
Despite the contract dispute with DMC and Tenet, Karmanos says there will be no disruption to patient care.
The statement below is courtesy of DMC:
For more than 100 years, the Detroit Medical Center has been this city’s healthcare safety net. Thousands of patients are being seen and treated on our campus every day. Karmanos is owned by McLaren Health Care, headquartered in Grand Blanc, and has no other presence in our city, preferring to center their broader healthcare services in wealthier suburbs of Michigan while relying on the DMC to subsidize its operations locally.
Karmanos was built here, on DMC’s campus, with DMC, for Detroit’s patients. DMC supplies to Karmanos what a cancer hospital cannot run without: laboratory, medical records, and operating room services among others. McLaren made a long term commitment with Karmanos in Detroit and now files a frivolous lawsuit as a disguised attempt to renege on their commitments on the DMC campus.
For more than a year, McLaren decided on its own what to pay for the support services it uses every day and paid a fraction of the cost. McLaren, as one of the wealthiest hospital systems in America that also owns an insurance company spent over a year asking a Detroit safety-net hospital to subsidize it. We absorbed the loss rather than let a payment dispute reach a single bedside. When finally asked to pay fair market value, McLaren sued, skipping the private mediation its own agreements require. That was a choice about publicity, and not about principle.
DMC honored its agreements. To this day, despite subsidizing the cost of these services for Karmanos, all necessary care remains available from the DMC. We expect McLaren to honor its own commitments. We reject the allegations and will answer them in court. We will not be taken advantage of. Not when the people of Detroit are the ones who pay for it.
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