Student Health Contractor Goes Bankrupt
BY ALYSON DAME

Last weekend, Oberlin’s Student Health pulled together to rescue its own life. Collegiate Healthcare, the company which technically employed all but one person working in Student Health, called unexpectedly last Thursday afternoon to announce that it was filing for bankruptcy, and

(photo by Lea Morgenstern)

would send termination letters to all its employees via overnight mail. The College has taken over running Student Health, and plans to continue until at least the end of this academic year.
The College knew that Collegiate Healthcare was in financial jeopardy, but was under the understanding that they were being bought out by Kelson Pediatric Partners. “We heard in July that they would be looking for another partner,” Dean of Students Peter Goldsmith said. “We were going ahead with the assumption that Student Health would be run by some other company but that there would be a fairly seamless transition.”
Until the call from CHC, Laura Hieronymus, health services director, had not been worried about the change in leadership. “I was not overly concerned because I’ve worked through seven or eight mergers in my career,” she said. According to Hieronymus, KPP is one of the biggest, and therefore most reliable companies in the industry. “I was not told or given any indication that there were any problems. I was totally stunned,” she said.
Samuel Macris, president of CHC, called Goldsmith on Thursday. “He informed me that the arrangement with Kelson — at the last minute, much to their amazement and distress — had fallen through,” Goldsmith said. “The same Thursday afternoon I called Laura Hieronymus to assure her that Student Health would stay open and that all the non-Oberlin employees of student health would have their salaries paid by Oberlin College starting last Saturday morning. The long and short of it is that since Saturday morning we’ve been running Student Health ourselves and students should detect no difference whatsoever.”
Operations have continued without interruption. “Literally, our staff got their last paychecks. The College immediately stepped in and hired all my employees, including myself,” Hieronymus said, adding, “Students shouldn’t notice, other than Laura looks a little more stressed out and tired.”
The change will not have a dramatic financial impact on the College. “We’re maybe in a slightly better position than some other schools because we, I think in retrospect very intelligently, arranged for [CHC] to give us a letter of credit to be held by a separate entity so if there are sums of money owed to us, we should have no problem recovering it,” Goldsmith said. According to Goldsmith, it could be that the College will save money by operating independently, but “it would take some time to do all the financial analysis to determine whether or not that was true.” 
Other colleges that contracted with CHC were harder hit. An article in the Bowling Green Daily News said, “Western abandoned its 30-year-old self-operating healthcare service in August 1999, after the university — lured by the promise of a new healthcare facility — contracted the services out to Collegiate. But that deal fell through and cost the university $60,000 after bank loans for the building didn’t materialize.”
Hieronymus saw the unexpected situation as a chance to implement change. “What we’re going to see now is the College using this opportunity to make changes for the positive with the health service,” she said, and mentioned increased staffing and a new location as possible places for improvement. 
But for now, student health will continue business as usual. “Nobody’s quitting, we’re pulling together and we all decided to stick it out,” Hieronymus said.