Well, a last minute lifeline could save a Jersey City hospital on the brink of shutting its doors.

A day after two state lawmakers announced a plan to push for up to $25 million in emergency funding, the operator of Heights University Hospital says he'd welcome the help, which would be tied to state monitoring and could be clawed back if the hospital doesn't meet certain conditions.

It's good to see you.

Great reporting on this.

I wanna ask first how the hospital got here to this financial breaking point so quickly after a takeover by Hudson Regional Health.

- Hey Brianna, yeah, thank you.

Thank you for giving me this opportunity.

A pleasure to speak about it.

So basically, as everybody knows, or at least a lot of people know, CarePoint Health owned these three hospitals.

They were formerly the Bayer Medical Center, Christ Hospital in Jersey City, Hoboken University Medical Center.

And then around April last year, they entered this, there's a bankruptcy proceeding ended and Hudson Regional at the time hospital took over.

And so now they have four hospitals, which was HRH and the three that I just named.

And obviously you don't go into bankruptcy if you're doing well financially.

So the hospitals had a lot of trouble.

And we remember a few years back that there was that scathing report from the state that talked about basically a shell operation going around between the operators.

And they said there was $150 million that was kind of just getting passed back and forth between the three owners.

So with all that said, how do we end up here again?

I mean, it remains unclear.

I mean, when you mentioned the CEO, Dr.

Nizer Kafaya, he put out that statement on Friday, and he said that basically this is a dire situation, and, you know, we need help from the state.

He didn't really elaborate on what was going on, but he said basically that they're going to need a lot of help to stay in operation, and that led to a lot of public officials, elected officials coming out, asking for the state to jump in on this.

And it hasn't happened yet, but as you alluded to, two state senators have a plan, and, you know, whether or not it gets the votes remains to be seen, but I'm told that even if it gets the full $25 million into the hospital system that's not going to be enough to keep it open long term.

So there's a lot of moving parts here.

Yeah, that's Raj Mukerji and Brian Stack who are putting that proposal forward.

What's the latest on that emergency aid?

And as you said, it seems like a lot more would be needed.

And the CEO alluded to it being sort of part of maybe a larger package to keep the place afloat.

Yeah, so as far as an update on the bill, I mean, that was just Tuesday, I believe.

So nothing really has changed since then as far as the legislation, as far as I'm aware of.

But, you know, I have spoken to State Senator McCurdy, who was the lead sponsor, and of course, a lot of co-sponsor Brian Stack, as you said.

But, you know, there's got to be the monitor, as you mentioned, and of course, they want to have some safeguards because when CarePoint was part of this, they had a lot of blank checks and obviously that didn't seem to do a lot of good in the long term.

So they're trying to make sure that we're not repeating past mistakes, or at least that's what it sounded like based on that Instagram reel where we detailed all of this, which is where we first heard about it.

Now, how much do I think it's going to take?

Hard to say definitively, but if you look at what Kefaya said on Friday, he said that they're getting about $60 million in losses just a month, just on Christ alone.

So that's pretty big, obviously.

I'm sorry, that was probably $60 million to date since they took over, but that's still a lot.

And, you know, obviously they're probably going to need, I don't want to put a number on it, but it's going to be a lot more than 25 million to stay open for the long term.

And, you know, you've seen, for example, Hudson County Commissioner Bill O'Day say that if this is redeveloped, the hospital needs to stay open and McCurgy echoed that sentiment as well.

So there is some concern in the community.

You know, I've heard from residents that are like, hey, is the hospital going to close?

Are they just going to turn it into a high rise?

And there was a redevelopment plan that was considered into Hoboken.

It didn't end up making an agenda ultimately.

But so redevelopment for these hospitals has been one proposal to try to get this to inject a little cash into this system.

But they haven't found a way where they could have a palatable situation for everybody involved.

Yeah, because, as you mentioned, it's not the first time they've been in financial crisis.

It went under the ownership of CarePoint.

That was the issue there.

But there was -- it was determined anyway, right, that there was a real need for this, that it was a safety net hospital.

What do we know about the immediate impacts it would have on the community and the people who rely on the services if they were to suspend?

So, if they do suspend nonessential services, I mean, you know, McCurdy and all the other electeds that we've talked about today have already said, I mean, it would just be catastrophic.

And the reason being is it's not just people that live in the Jersey City Heights, where I happen to live, that go to this hospital.

I mean, you also have people from Journal Square, from Union City, from, you know, a lot of areas in the surrounding community.

Some people from Hoboken, too, even though they have their own hospitals.

So, and, you know, to put all that -- all those patients and all of those services on the back of the Jersey City Medical Center, I mean, certainly they couldn't accommodate that overnight or even over the span of a few months if I was going to take a stab at it.

So -- and we also heard from a clergy.

They noted that this is a hospital where a lot of patients use Medicare, a lot of patients don't have insurance, so they're basically treated for free, which is part of the reason why we're in the -- they're in the dire straits here.

But the problem for them is there's not obviously just a hospital out every quarter where they could get free treatment or Medicaid-accepted care.

So obviously there's a big concern here for the underprivileged communities in the Jersey City community and beyond.

Yeah.

And not to mention, which we didn't even talk about, but federal funding is obviously on shaky ground.

We have to leave it there.

John Heinis, thanks so much for sharing your reporting with us.

Appreciate it, as always.

Liana, thanks for having me on.

Really appreciate it.

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