Buena Park Firm Purchases Defunct CareUnit Hospital

The health-services company that owns Buena Park Community Hospital has bought the defunct CareUnit Hospital of Orange for $4.82 million, the facility’s former owner announced Monday.

Comprehensive Care Corp., a St. Louis-based chain of alcohol and drug treatment centers, sold its 104-bed Orange facility to Lincoln Community Medical Corp. in Buena Park. CareUnit Hospital was closed in April, a victim of the weak economy and of cutbacks in health insurance reimbursements for psychiatric care, said Comprehensive Care spokeswoman Lisa Urvater.

A subsidiary of the Pasadena-based hospital chain Paracelsus Health Care Corp., Lincoln Community owns one other Orange County facility--Buena Park Community Hospital, a psychiatric and drug-treatment center. Paracelsus Health Care’s 24 medical facilities throughout the country include general care, convalescent, psychiatric and drug-treatment centers, said company Vice President Robert Joyner.

Joyner said the company had not yet decided on a new name for the former CareUnit facility, nor whether it would remain a drug-treatment center. He added that it would reopen at the beginning of December.

“We like the (Orange County) market, and the price was favorable,” Joyner said.

At its peak in 1987, Comprehensive Care owned 25 drug-treatment facilities across the country but has since sold or closed all but 13 centers. In 1990, the chain sold its Brea Hospital Neuropsychiatric Center to Laguna Hills-based Community Psychiatric Centers. Comprehensive Care still owns Starting Point, a 70-bed, chemical-dependency treatment center in Costa Mesa.

Richard Vincent, regional director for CareUnit of Orange and now for Starting Point, said the two facilities within 10 miles of one another were “duplicating services.”

“We wanted to concentrate on one hospital and make it successful,” Vincent said. At the time that it closed, he said, CareUnit’s occupancy rate was only about 30%, compared to Starting Point’s current occupancy rate of 55%.

The cost of treatment at Comprehensive Care centers averages between $4,000 and $10,000 a patient, Vincent said. During its heyday in the early 1980s, the Orange center--founded in 1977--had a long waiting lists of people seeking treatment.

But as many companies have reduced group health insurance coverage of in-patient psychiatric treatment in recent years, that price tag for drug and alcohol counseling has become less affordable.

“All of us (drug-treatment facilities) are suffering,” Vincent noted.

In the fiscal year of 1991, ending May 31, Comprehensive Care lost $16 million on operating revenues of $85 million.