Sentara continues to look for more growth opportunities. Most recently, Myers notes, it stepped in after the bankruptcy and closing of Newport News General Hospital. The Department of Housing and Urban Development put out a request for proposals, Myers says. The department was looking for somebody to move into the empty facility. They did select us, and we are still in the middle of finalizing what we might be able to do.
Premiums are flat, revenues are relatively flat, but costs are going down.
They have earned profits in the face of the financially constrained environment where employers want lower premiums, so they can't complain about that, and it's the HMOs that are causing the squeeze. When the company examines health care charges, determines they're too high, and threatens to drop a hospital from its network, things can get heated. In late 1996 Trigon warned top brass at the Danville Regional Health System that they would be dropped from the network unless they brought charges in line with expectations. According to the medical center's chief executive, Larry DePriest, it wasn't that the health system wasn't willing to negotiate. It just challenged the numbers Trigon was using.