Opinion ID: 1897190
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: hmc-operated hospitals

Text: HCA is an investor-owned corporation whose stock is traded on the New York Stock Exchange. At the time these causes of action arose (1983), HCA claimed revenues totalling almost $4 billion and net income of $243,218,000, according to its annual report. It owned all of the stock of the corporations that own Doctors Hospital and Knollwood Park Hospital in Mobile and L.V. Stabler Memorial Hospital in Greenville. HMC is a wholly owned subsidiary of HCA. It has management agreements with Monroe County Hospital in Monroeville and Flowers Hospital in Dothan. It is a Delaware corporation. On July 31, 1984, there were 15 officers of HCA. One of those officers also served as an officer of HMC. There were 18 directors of HCA. Of those directors, two served as directors of HMC. HMC is responsible, generally, for the day-to-day operations of the hospitals with which it has management agreements. The management agreement entered into between Monroe County Hospital and HMC, for example, gave HMC the authority and responsibility to conduct, supervise, and manage the day-to-day operation of the Hospital and provided that Subject to any different conditions imposed by the Board, HMC shall manage the Hospital in the same efficient manner as HCA manages hospitals solely owned by it. All personnel decisions were vested in HMC, including in-service training, attendance at seminars or conferences, staffing schedules, and job and position descriptions with respect to all employees of the Hospital. HCA West is one of five major corporate bodies for which HCA serves as the holding or parent company. HCA West has six divisions, and one of these is the New Orleans division, which oversees both managed and owned HCA facilities in Alabama. Twyman Lee Towery, vice president of the New Orleans division of HCA West, Inc., which encompasses Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi, testified in a deposition that he also served as vice president of Doctors Hospital of Mobile and Community Hospital of Andalusia. He identified the directors of the Doctors Hospital board, who also served as president of HCA West and vice presidents of operations and development for HCA. The appellants insist that important rights of ownership, vested in HCA, included the right to guarantee management agreements, to institute its own retirement program, to hire and fire employees, to install its own management team, to centralize financial operationsincluding bookkeeping, contracting, and cash managementand to bill hospitals for the services, expenses, and fringe benefits of the management teams it supplied through HMC. Further, the vice president of the New Orleans division of HCA West, Mr. Towery, described himself as a focal point, a liaison, and a conduit between the corporation that managed the hospitals (HMC) and HCA. While the evidence, when viewed most favorably to the plaintiffs' cases, establishes a close-knit relationship among the HMC-operated hospitals, their corporate managers, and HCA, we find that the summary judgment movants have met their burden of showing that there is no triable issue of material fact in the two cases involving Monroe County Hospital ( Larrimore and Anderson ) and in the one case involving Flowers Hospital ( Long ). We find no evidence from which the factfinder could reasonably infer that HCA controlled, or retained the right to control, the day-to-day operations of the HMC-operated hospitals. Indeed, the case of Ex Parte Baker, 432 So.2d 1281 (Ala.1983), for all practical purposes, presented the same issue, based on substantially the same facts as those here presented with respect to the HMC-operated hospitals. As this Court held in Baker, we now hold, as to Larrimore, Anderson, and Long, that the evidence is insufficient to present a triable issue of fact with regard to HCA's status as employer of the alleged tort-feasors. The evidence is without dispute that the business affairs of HMC, as the manager and operator of the two subject hospitals, were conducted in a manner appropriate to its separate purposes and functions, without the degree of dominion and control required for it to be regarded as the alter ego, or a mere instrumentality, of its corporate parent, HCA. In addition to the cases cited in Baker, see Duff v. Southern Railway Co., 496 So.2d 760 (Ala.1986), for an excellent discussion of the parent/subsidiary corporation dichotomy. See, also, Barrett v. Odom, May & DeBuys, 453 So.2d 729 (Ala. 1984).