Nurses, community activists, and public officials have expressed worry about the prospect of changes to the Crozer-Keystone Health System that the buyer, Prospect Medical Holdings in California, may have in store.

However, the company’s president did his best to allay those fears.

The deal calls for Prospect Medical Holdings to change almost nothing about the operations of Crozer-Keystone for five years, writes Harold Brubaker of the Philadelphia Inquirer.

Mitchell Lew – president of Prospect, which is based in Los Angeles and has 14 hospitals in California, Texas, Rhode Island, and New Jersey – offered assurance that the company would be committed to the community.

“Our roots are in local community hospitals serving underserved populations, Medicaid, primarily government paid, in East Los Angeles, in places where patients would come to us because no one else would take them,” he said at a hearing on Crozer’s Upland campus. “That is in our DNA.”

According to Brubaker, mayors Thaddeus Kirkland of Chester and Michael Ciach of Upland both highlighted the fact that Crozer-Keystone, no longer a non-profit, would start paying taxes after the for-profit Prospect Medical took over.

“We want to say welcome, and we look forward to your tax dollars,” Kirkland said.

Click here to read more about Prospect Medical’s commitment to Crozer-Keystone in the Inquirer.