Mayor Muriel Bowser is asking the D.C. Council to commit $60 million to support the Cedar Hill Regional Medical Center, the 136-bed hospital in Ward 8 that was built with taxpayer funds and handed to a private operator but has faced stumbles since it opened last year.
Bowser made her request for the money — $10 million a year for six years — in a letter last week to D.C. Council Chairman Phil Mendelson and At-Large council member Christina Henderson, who chairs the council’s health committee. She said it would support the hospital’s labor and delivery unit, which has been rapidly losing money since the hospital opened in April 2025.
“The cost of operating a full-service maternal and fetal services is substantial,” Bowser wrote. “Unlike other hospital services, maternal health care has a significantly longer lead time to financial stability.”
According to Bowser’s letter, the unit lost $8.6 million last year and is on track to lose $11.5 million more this year. Breaking even may be years off, she said, largely because of declining birth rates in D.C. and competition from other hospitals.
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From January through July of this year, Cedar Hill recorded 86 newborn admissions, according to data provided by the D.C. Hospital Association. By comparison, Sibley Memorial Hospital had 1,874 admissions over that same time period, and the Washington Hospital Center had 1,518. Cedar Hill represented only 1.6% of all newborn admissions across the city over those months.
The request carries heavy symbolic weight for Bowser, who pledged early in her 12-year run as mayor to complete the hospital. When she cut the ribbon on Cedar Hill last year, she said it would “change the trajectory of health care in our community” — referring to Wards 7 and 8, which for years have suffered from lagging health indicators and lack of good medical services. That’s especially true for maternal health care, as Black women suffer 84% of the city’s maternal deaths.
“Cedar Hill’s opening — the District’s first new full-service hospital in more than 25 years — will play a key role in helping to reduce existing health care disparities,” Bowser wrote to the council last week. “A critical aspect of Cedar Hill’s operations, and an important factor in addressing these disparities, is providing labor and delivery services and building a strong maternal and newborn health system for Wards 7 and 8. Despite citywide gains in reducing infant and maternal mortality rates, they remain unacceptably higher east of the river.”
But Bowser’s request has prompted questions and concerns from many lawmakers, who worry the city will end up pouring more public money into sustaining Cedar Hill even after having paid to build the hospital — which is operated by GW Health and Universal Health Services — to avoid such a scenario.
“We got out of United Medical Center because it was costing us $10 million a year, and we set up Cedar Hill so it would not cost us more money,” said Mendelson, referring to the former hospital in Ward 8 that D.C. ended up having to take over and support financially for years before it was closed last year and replaced by Cedar Hill.
Henderson said she was surprised by how much Bowser was requesting. Initial conversations over the summer hovered around a one-time $10 million payment, but Bowser’s request for that amount for six consecutive years is “a lot more than we thought.”
That’s especially the case, she said, because D.C. already gives GW Health $5 million a year to run the hospital, and Cedar Hill gets a higher Medicaid reimbursement rate than every other hospital except Howard University’s.
Both Mendelson and Henderson said that nobody seemed to have laid the necessary groundwork ahead of Cedar Hill’s opening to ensure it could deliver more babies than it is now.
“How you establish labor and delivery services, especially in a city like ours where you have multiple birthing hospitals, is that you have to establish relationships with the community doctors such that they want to deliver at your hospital,” Henderson said. “If Cedar Hill doesn’t establish those relationships, I’m not surprised you’re having volume issues, and frankly that’s on UHS. All of that should have been done before the hospital opened.”
Cedar Hill isn’t the first D.C. hospital that has faced difficult questions about labor and delivery. Earlier this year, the Washington Hospital Center closed one of its two postpartum units, citing decreasing birth rates and Medicaid reimbursement rates.
A spokesperson for GW Health did not respond to multiple requests for comment. D.C. officials also did not respond to a request from The Washington Sun. But in testimony on a separate issue to the council this week, GW Health CEO Jason Barrett seemed to concede Henderson’s point. “A lesson learned … we should have done a better job of community involvement,” he said.
The hospital reported over the summer that it faced a number of challenges in its first year, including mounting financial losses and long emergency room wait times. It also has faced complaints about the quality of care, staffing challenges and declining community trust.
“I think a six-year commitment locks in the future administration in terms of what happens next. We all want to see Cedar Hill be successful, but we have to understand what is the trajectory here that doesn’t require significant additional support from the public,” Henderson said.
In her letter to lawmakers, Bowser said the financial commitment “will not simply be a blank check.” She said the hospital had already “rightsized its operating costs” and that ongoing reforms “have already begun improving the hospital’s growth and financial stability.” She also said Unity Health Care — a community health provider that operates clinics for low-income patients across the city — had agreed to take over the hospital’s labor and delivery unit, creating a pathway from the clinics in Wards 7 and 8 to the hospital.
But Henderson also has questions about that, especially since Unity has recently undergone rounds of layoffs due to its own financial challenges. On Wednesday, she sent a list of follow-up questions to Bowser’s aides about the proposed $60 million commitment, which the council — including Ward 4 council member Janeese Lewis George, the likely next mayor — will have to sign off on.
“I know the mayor cannot see this fail on her watch,” Henderson told The Sun. “But her watch is over in January, and I’m concerned about what the future mayor and the rest of us will be left with especially if there are no metrics around how this gets better.”
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