University of Vermont Health Network leaders met with a varied reception in the Vermont Statehouse Thursday, with back-to-back hearings in a skeptical House committee and a friendlier Senate one.
The health network — which includes Burlington’s University of Vermont Medical Center, Porter Medical Center in Middlebury and Central Vermont Medical Center in Berlin, as well as three hospitals in northern New York — is the state’s largest, and a major player in its health care landscape.
Recently, network leaders have drawn scrutiny and criticism over wide-ranging cuts to services across Vermont, the movement of money between Vermont and New York hospitals, as well as the news that executives had received bonuses worth several million dollars at the end of 2024.
Thursday’s hearings featured UVM Health Network president and CEO Sunny Eappen and Jessica Moschella, the network’s senior vice president for high value care, and were billed as an “introduction” and “overview” in agendas for the two health care committees.
“The one thing, the one reason that we exist, is to serve our patients and to serve our communities. That’s it,” Eappen told lawmakers on the House Committee on Health Care.
Implementing service cuts — which network leaders say were forced by orders from the Green Mountain Care Board, a key regulator — were “the most difficult decisions that I certainly have ever had to make,” Eappen said. “It’s the last thing a physician or health care leader wants to do, which is to reduce services to patients who need that.”
But at the House Committee on Health Care, lawmakers seemed skeptical. In a sometimes tense back-and-forth, Chair Alyssa Black, D-Essex, asked Eappen whether Vermont money was being used to shore up Champlain Valley Physicians Hospital in Plattsburgh, New York, which has lost millions in recent years.
READ MORE
“Where are they receiving the money to pay the costs associated with that hospital?” Black asked.
“So, they have days cash on hand that they’ve been sucking dry,” Eappen said. “Their days cash on hand is like 10.”
“So how do you pay payroll?” Black said.
“Well, it’ll be from those dollars,” Eappen said, adding that if the network needed to shore up the hospital’s finances with money from elsewhere, “we would do it.”
But, he emphasized, that movement of money does not affect any of the prices charged by Vermont hospitals for care.
Later, Rep. Mari Cordes, D-Lincoln, a nurse at the University of Vermont Medical Center, asked the network to provide answers about how many senior vice presidents it employed and their compensation information, as well as for their rationale for cutting patient services.
Cordes accused Eappen of cutting “critical services because you could, not because (regulators) asked it of you.”
The most dramatic exchange came when Rep. Daisy Berbeco, D-Winooski, asked Eappen about the bonus he received at the end of 2024. How much exactly was that bonus, she asked?
About $400,000, Eappen replied. “I was recruited at a salary that I accepted when I came here, with the opportunity to have bonuses,” he said. “The bonus for FY24 for me is set by our compensation committee. I don’t have anything to do with that.”
“Could you have not accepted your bonus?” Berbeco asked.
“The leadership team considered, should we not accept bonuses this year, and is that the right thing to do?” Eappen said. “And we decided that it was fair for us to get that.”
“The same year that you’re making cuts in essential services for Vermonters?” Berbeco said.
“In the same year that we made essential cuts,” Eappen said, before noting that the timeline of cuts and compensation was slightly more complicated.
Later that morning, in the Senate Committee on Health and Welfare, however, the network leadership was received more warmly.
Lawmakers there posed questions on affordability and access as well, but were much less confrontational than in the House. Asked by senators about high prices at network hospitals, Eappen argued that Vermont is an older, sparsely populated state, whose residents have increasingly complex needs — requiring more expensive care.
Instead of cuts to patient revenue, something ordered by the Green Mountain Care Board, Eappen called for reforming how health care is financed.
“Moving us to a different model of how we deliver care, where we get paid for quality, we get paid for how we manage the overall patient, and it’s per capita,” he said. “That is the way to do it.”
At that meeting, Sen. Ginny Lyons, D-Chittenden Southeast, the committee chair, stated that “the media is having a field day” with some of the network’s actions.
“We’re very appreciative of the work that you do,” Lyons told network leaders.
Read the story on VTDigger here: At Statehouse, UVM Health Network CEO faces tough questions — and praise.