Moody's: Nonprofit Healthcare Debt Sees Record Downgrade

"The remainder continues to sit on our balance sheets today," she says. "We've made investments in an insurance company, Soundpath, as well as looking at other opportunities, some of which aren't public yet," she says, adding that the risks of taking on bond indebtedness in a volatile market have been offset by "the exceptional capital market environment that we were in."

"At the time we issued the debt the cost was only slightly greater than that which we could achieve with the exempt debt and we have much more flexibility in how we spend these proceeds. We issued a five-year tranche, a 10-year tranche and a 30-year tranche and each of them were index eligible, which means they were at least $250 million each," she says.

"We decided to enter the debt market last fall because we saw in our future strategic opportunities that we wanted to be ready to avail ourselves of. The issuance of the magnitude of the debt that we put into the market last fall can cause something like this to occur. We certainly realized there was a possibility."