Steward Health Care offers to buy hospitals in Fla.

By Beth Healy, Globe Staff

A month after announcing plans to expand nationally, the owners of the Caritas Christi Health Care Hospitals have made a bid on an even larger hospital group in Miami.

Steward Health Care System, the Boston-based hospital company that last year bought six Catholic hospitals in the area, has offered to take over the financially troubled Jackson Health System in Miami for $600 million, plus $500 million to cover debt, according to a letter of intent Steward sent the group Monday. Jackson owns six hospitals, including its flagship Jackson Memorial teaching hospital.

As with the Boston acquisition, Steward is appoaching a hospital group with limited options: The Jackson system has lost more than $300 million over the past two years and is on track to run out of cash by summer. Steward is owned by a deep-pocketed private equity firm in New York, Cerberus Capital Management, and Boston executive Ralph de la Torre is leading its charge to assemble a large hospital chain.

Any deal with Jackson would have to be approved by the Public Health Trust that oversees the system, as well as the Board of County Commissioners in Miami-Dade County.

Steward executives were unavailable to be interviewed on their first major foray outside the Boston market. In a statement, a Florida spokesman the company has hired said, "Intensive discussions with elected and appointed officials are just getting underway, and at the same time we are preparing for a thorough due diligence period."

Dr. Mark Rogers, a trustee on the Public Health Trust board and a former chief executive at Duke Hospital, said Jackson just recently decided to consider private investments in the ailing public hospital group. But the board is concerned about maintaining the hospitals' standards.

"If we choose a partner that's merely interested in cutting costs, we may end up hurting the University of Miami, the medical school and the development of new centers of excellence at Jackson,'' Rogers said. "We need to evaluate whether Steward would be interested in and be able to help support those activities, or whether their attention to cost cutting will result in conflicts on these issues."

Cerberus, which manages $23 billion in investments, spent $895 million to buy the Caritas hospitals -- including St. Elizabeth's Medical Center in Brighton and Carney Hospital in Dorchester -- and create Steward last November.