Copyright Star Tribune
Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison says a deal announced Wednesday by Fairview and doctors at the University of Minnesota is critical for preventing a damaging “unwind” of agreements that will expire next year for funding the U’s academic health program. Recruiting and retaining doctors at the university, as well as the U’s research and teaching mission, were all threatened by instability if the three parties embarked on the lengthy process of disentangling their operations, Ellison says. The U signaled strong opposition to the plan Wednesday. Ellison called on the university to join negotiations for remaining issues such as provisions for graduate medical education and joint branding of hospitals and clinics. “The possibility of an unwind of the agreements that would have been devastating for all three parties, their staff and patients, and the provision of medicine in Minnesota at large, was real and growing,” Ellison said in a statement. He added: “With today’s agreement, an unwind is now a far more distant possibility than it was before.” The attorney general’s strategic facilitator Lois Quam has been working since the spring on strategies to bring the parties together for a new agreement, including a now-abandoned proposal for Fairview to merge with Duluth-based Essentia Health. Quam told the U’s Board of Regents in May that the future of health care training, research and patient care at the university was too important to get lost in long-standing disagreements between Fairview and the U. “I recognize that there has been turbulent water under this bridge,” Quam said at the time. “We can’t undo that. But there is too much at stake to dwell on past disputes. ... Agreements can and will be reached. There is far more that unites than divides.”
