HCA-owned Mission Hospital in Asheville has received four “immediate jeopardy” warnings from the federal Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services in the past five years. This warning, the most serious from CMS, means that a medical service provider has caused, or is likely to cause, harm or impairment to recipients of care.
Mission Hospital is an anomaly.
It is also the only Level I trauma center in Western North Carolina, serving 18 counties in WNC. It’s also the only hospital in the state with a nurse’s union, which formed in 2020, a year after the Nashville-based for-profit healthcare company HCA purchased the Mission Health group, which also includes additional hospitals in surrounding mountain counties. Before the sale, Mission operated as a nonprofit…