1 Boring Old Man

Milking a church cow

Dr. James W. Holsinger, President George W. Bush’s nominee for Surgeon General has been a controversial figure in the United Methodist Church for decades. He was elected through the efforts of a well-organized group of activists, along with two other conservatives, to the church’s Judicial Council in May, 2000, which gave the Council a rightwing majority. Holsinger has been the President of the Judicial Council since 2004. During the years that Holsinger has been on the Council, a number of unprecedented and divisive rulings have been made.

While Holsinger has been on the UMC’s Judicial Council, he also served on the board of trustees of the Good Samaritan Foundation (GSF) from July 2000 and chaired the trustees starting in 2003. The UMC and the GSF were engaged in a long and costly lawsuit beginning in May 2000. Two former members of the Judicial Council who worked with Holsinger from 2000-2004, Sally C. Askew, Esq., and Sally B. Geis, Ph.D., stated that Holsinger never mentioned being party to a lawsuit against the UMC, nor did he at any time address possible conflicts of interest involved in being a member of the UMC’s "supreme court" while engaged in significant litigation against the UMC.

The litigation involved the sale in 1995 of a 330 bed UMC hospital in Lexington, Kentucky, to a for-profit corporation and the disposition of the $20 million realized from the sale. The hospital’s trustees refused to hand over the proceeds to the rightful owners, the Kentucky Annual Conference of the UMC. Instead, the self-appointed trustees placed the $20 million into a fund under their sole control in an undisclosed location. Then the trustees proceeded to form six corporate subsidiaries, including one that was incorporated in Alaska and Wisconsin. Additionally, in direct conflict with the stated values of the UMC  the trustees engaged in gambling fund-raising ventures, one of which lost $27,500.

According to court records, the foundation’s trustees refused to tell the KAC what happened to the $20 million from the sale of the UMC hospital for nearly five years. From the time of the sale of the property in July of 1995 until the KAC filed suit against the GSF on May 18, 2000, the foundation’s trustees "refused to give an accounting of the proceeds from the sale to the Kentucky Annual Conference". In fact, as late as June of 2006 the lay and clergy members of the KAC felt compelled to pass a resolution formally seeking necessary "[i]nformation on assets, income earned, tax issues…investment practices, conflicts of interest, and other information" from the foundation.

The Good Samaritan Hospital of Lexington, Kentucky, was one of dozens of hospitals built by the Methodist church in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to provide care for the poor and indigent. The GSH had an unbroken legal and historic connection to Kentucky Methodism dating back to 1925. Photographic evidence presented in court showed that from 1968 until 1995, signs inside and outside of the hospital publicly proclaimed "The Good Samaritan Hospital of the United Methodist Church." Not surprisingly, the Kentucky courts repeatedly ruled that the hospital "was held in trust" for the KAC and that the church rightfully owns the assets.

Holsinger questioned the motives and integrity of the UMC in public comments during the litigation. He publicly stated his personal belief that the UMC was "only interested in the Foundation’s money, not its cause" [health care for the poor and disadvantaged]. This is a surprising accusation, given the long tradition among Methodists of caring for the destitute and sick. The Rev. John Wesley, an Anglican priest and founder of Methodism, who opened the first free medical clinic and pharmacy in England in 1746, would find it a peculiar charge, as would the 60 million Methodists worldwide who have built hundreds of hospitals and medical clinics and continue to do so in places such as AIDS-plagued regions of Africa.

According to a number of individuals intimately acquainted with the litigation, Holsinger was the dominant personality among the trustees and the driving force in the prolongation of the lawsuit. Shortly after GSF lost to the UMC for a second time, Holsinger stated on January 6, 2007, that the GSF trustees, which he chaired, would persist in its legal battle. He kept his word, and the lawsuit continued unabated for several more months. It was only when Holsinger was named as Surgeon General nominee that the litigation came to an abrupt halt. Within a matter of days after his May 24, 2007, nomination, Holsinger resigned from the GSF trustees and the lawsuit, communicating through a spokesperson that to continue would be incompatible with an appointment as Surgeon General. Within a mere two weeks, the suit was finally settled, after seven years of litigation…