Westerly Holdco and NS Healthcare Holdco are affiliated with IJKG Opco, a hospital management company in Bayonne, N.J. IJKG Opco owns Hoboken (N.J.) University Medical Center, Bayonne (N.J.) Medical Center and was recently approved by a bankruptcy judge to purchase Christ Hospital in Jersey City, N.J., through Hudson Holdco, another affiliate.

After a very bitter and public feud, the Bayonne Medical Center and Horizon Blue Cross Blue Shield of New Jersey announced an agreement last month that made the hospital in-network for subscribers.

The dispute cast a large shadow on a bid by the ownership group of Bayonne Medical Center to purchase Hoboken University Medical Center. Some feared that customers of the state’s largest insurer — Blue Cross Blue Shield of New Jersey — would be shut out of the the Hoboken facility.

The parties said last month's agreement would extend to Hoboken and quelled some of those fears, but the fine print of the agreement has raised new concerns.

The ownership group of Bayonne Medical Center may be as well versed in the art of Trenton politics as it is in medicine.

Facing legislative calls for increased oversight of for-profit hospitals as it pursues a controversial deal at Hoboken University Medical Center, the group has spent more than $350,000 in the past two years on political campaigns and high-powered lobbyists to make their case at the Statehouse, records show.

The Bayonne hospital paid Rosemont Associates, a lobbying firm that employs former U.S. Sen. Robert Torricelli (D-N.J.) to help convince the chairmen of the state legislative budget committees to support an $11 million earmark to ease the sale of the Hoboken University Medical Center, records show.

Within the span of 19 months, Hudson County residents have witnessed the sale of one of the local hospitals – Meadowlands Hospital Medical Center in Secaucus – and the pending sales of two others, Hoboken University Medical Center and Christ Hospital in Jersey City. In all three instances, the hospitals switched, or will switch, from nonprofit ownership to become for-profit entities.

These sales come just a few years after the closures of Greenville Hospital and St. Francis Hospital in Jersey City, and three years after Bayonne Medical Center also changed hands from nonprofit to for-profit ownership.