The University of Minnesota wants an additional $60 million to $80 million in annual state funding for its academic health programs as the first step in a long-term plan to improve and expand training programs, medical research and care provided at hospitals and clinics.

While specific priorities for the money would be set in conjunction with lawmakers, the funding might be used to recruit and retain more world-class doctors and researchers, the U says, while also expanding patient services and health professionals’ training at the university’s primary care and safety net clinics.

The longer-term vision includes the U obtaining greater control over University of Minnesota Medical Center in Minneapolis and, eventually, building a new state-of-the-art facility on the East Bank campus.

U officials are outlining the proposal Wednesday at a meeting of Gov. Tim Walz’s task force on academic health at the university, which is developing recommendations for how lawmakers might bolster health professional training programs at the U.

“This is a moment where the university, I think, is recognizing the opportunities for it to lean in to its public mission,” Myron Frans, the U’s senior vice president for finance and operations, said in an interview. “A lot of this is our … recognition that we need to be a bigger leader in health care, in workforce development, in research, innovation and care — and running a hospital, too.”

Beyond securing more funding for the academic health programs, the U wants to stabilize finances at the U hospital, perhaps through tweaks to Medicaid reimbursements. The university also wants the state to conduct a feasibility study that looks at the future of public health care facilities in Minnesota.

The study would consider needs at the university, Frans said, as well as Hennepin Healthcare and the Minneapolis Veterans Medical Center.

“Do we need a new Level One trauma center? Well, probably I think Hennepin Healthcare would say: ‘Yes,'” Frans said. “Do we need a new complex care transplant place? Well, yes, that’s our East Bank vision. What about the VA?”

The details come as the U is renegotiating its affiliation with Fairview Health Services, the Minneapolis-based health system that acquired University of Minnesota Medical Center in 1997. Ever since, Fairview has provided significant financial support for teaching and research at the U — at least $100 million this year alone.

Fairview has said it can’t keep making payments at that level. Even so, Frans said the plan being presented Wednesday assumes the health system will continue that support until the current affiliation agreement expires at the end of 2026.

Uncertainty over the future affiliation is complicating the work of the task force, which can’t get into the details of the Fairview partnership yet also is trying to advise lawmakers on funding the U’s training programs.

The U’s medical school trains about 70% of physicians currently practicing in Minnesota, and the task force is considering whether taxpayers, and other players across the health sector, need to provide more funding.

“We’re in daily talks — ongoing talks with Fairview. We continue to work on that,” Frans said. “And there’s, I think, a better recognition that we really can help one another in this first step to take back ownership, control and governance — however we decide to do that in a few years — at the four facilities within University of Minnesota Medical Center.”

When Fairview acquired the U hospital, it combined the medical center’s operations with the old Fairview Riverside hospital near the West Bank campus. The medical center complex has since grown to include a large outpatient clinic building on the East Bank as well as a pediatric hospital near the West Bank campus.

The U and Fairview updated their affiliation agreement in 2018 to launch M Health Fairview, the brand they use to market health care services across a prominent network of hospitals and clinics including Fairview Southdale in Edina and Woodwinds Hospital in Woodbury.

Over the past five years, however, Fairview has posted a series of operating losses. This financial red ink was in the background when the health system last year proposed a merger with South Dakota-based Sanford Health.

The U opposed the combination as it would have shifted control of the teaching hospital for Minnesota’s public medical school to Sanford’s headquarters in Sioux Falls.

“We really need to control these University clinical assets going forward so that who decides which health care services are provided in those buildings is the University, not whoever the owner might be, whether it’s Fairview or somebody else,” Frans said.

When Sanford and Fairview abandoned the proposed combination this summer, the focus turned to how the U and Fairview might salvage or restructure their fraught relationship.

In March, the Star Tribune reported how Fairview officials believed the 2018 agreement was directing more financial benefits to the U than the health system. University officials, in response, blasted what they called “the depth of mismanagement” at the health system.

Despite the bad blood, Frans indicated that the U and the health system are trying to maintain their partnership.

“We want the cooperation and the special opportunities that we get with a dedicated or special relationship like Fairview,” he said. “We hope to do more of those [relationships], but certainly we need a big one — and a major one — which we think is with Fairview at this point.”