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Issue link: https://loumag.epubxp.com/i/53439
But while the Courier-Journal's news pages remained absent of merger debate until June 2011, the merger had been a hot topic at the medical school. At least as early as December 2010, Halperin met regularly with faculty and staff at the School of Medicine discussing the impacts and ethics of the merger. Tese often-crowded meetings were announced on- line, on the public portion of the university's website. In January 2011, after an earlier meeting with the Department of Medicine, Halperin lectured at the School of Nursing, inviting medical students, residents and community physicians. Later that month he spoke in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology. And in April, in a lecture announced in an electronic newsletter that goes to every stu- dent, faculty member and U of L staff mem- ber — and is posted on the Internet — he met again with faculty, students and staff. Yet it might as well have been a secret. "Nobody was talking to us," says Bennie Ivory, Courier-Journal executive editor. "We didn't have any specifics. . . . Everything was shrouded in secrecy. We don't deal in specula- tion. We went with what we knew. Once we figured out what the game plan was, then we went after it." It is true that the university was any- thing but forthcoming. When stories ap- peared about the merger, they were littered with official statements rather than evidence that university officials had made themselves available to answer direct questions from re- porters. When the university complained of media inaccuracies, the website Insider Louisville puckishly commented, "No kidding. People do tend to fill in the blanks in the absence of actual information." Te university "posted talking points on a web page in lieu of go- ing one-on-one with reporters," the website contended, adding, "they still want to get out their message without all the messiness of be- ing asked for particulars." During the June-to-June period, the C-J carried about a dozen stories that men- tioned the merger, six of which were entirely devoted to it. Only one story, on Nov. 11, 2010, included any suggestion that Catholic healthcare directives could become an issue. Te reference comes in the 20th and 21st paragraphs: "Officials from the three hospital orga- nizations said they don't think that the Catholic Church's stance on reproduc- tive issues will be a stumbling block (to the merger). University Hospital offi- cials said they don't do abortions at the hospital. "Dr. Edward Halperin, dean of U of L's medical school, said he has researched similar mergers and the issue 'is not a 2.12 LOUISVILLE MAGAZINE [55] problem. It's an opportunity and is emi- nently solvable.' He said the hospital sys- tems involved in the likely merger share a commitment to the 'primacy and pri- vacy of the doctor-patient relationship.'" Tat was it. If it were not for Gabriella Alcalde and the Louisville Metro Board of Health, perti- nent questions might have emerged too late. In April 2011, Alcalde, the vice chair of the Board of Health, grew more than curious about the merger. Alcalde is a consultant on public health with a long history in work- ing on health-care access issues. Because the merger involved the city's safety-net hospi- tal, which handled 55,000 indigent cases in 2009, she wanted to know more about the consolidation's potential impact, and began looking for stories on the topic. "I was shocked I didn't find more," she says. "Te more I thought about it — that this is a public hospital, that it is a teaching hospital, that it is a safety-net hospital, and Dueling points of view: the half-page protest ad in the C-J (below) and a full-page countering ad from the merger partners.