A Hospital Empire Is Closing Its Doors--but the Stock Is on a Tear -- The American Prospect

[erronis]

https://prospect.org/health/2025-03-18-hospital-empire-closing-its-doors-stock-on-a-tear-mpt/

More than a dozen hospitals employing tens of thousands have either shut this year or are on the brink, while two shadowy figures prop up their owners’ stock.
by Maureen Tkacik, Teri Buhl

A very long and very in-depth article on some obvious malfeasance by investors in hospital chains. I'll admit I couldn't follow all of the transactions but the outcomes are the usual: profiteers and the losers (patients, staff, local governments.)

Last week, the few hundred remaining employees of two hospitals in Warren, Ohio, got an email informing them they were suspending hospital admissions following a sudden rise in costs precipitated by a Houston bankruptcy court ruling.

A week earlier, the 3,200 employees still working for the gutted Crozer Health system outside Philadelphia received an email wishing them a happy “Employee Appreciation Day” in spite of the fact that they would all be imminently losing their jobs, thanks to the ruling of a bankruptcy judge in Dallas.

A week before that, the Yale New Haven Health system signaled it was backing out of a deal it had made in 2022 to buy three Connecticut hospitals, in a statement characterizing the facilities’ condition as so degraded from years of failing to pay vendors as to render the transactions “impossible.” And a hospital on Florida’s central coast announced it was shutting down next month, blaming “years of neglect [that had] left the facility in such poor condition that it did not meet the system’s standards for patient-care environments.”

Just a few weeks before that, doctors and nurses in South Florida showed up at a Hialeah City Council meeting to beg authorities to intervene in the management of five struggling hospitals in the region that they said haven’t been paying their anesthesiologists or obstetricians and have been routinely delinquent on pay to nurses and other staffers. The hospitals have also been reportedly threatening to shut down the area’s last remaining maternity ward, which delivered 1,400 babies last year, and a linen supplier recently filed a motion threatening to repossess all five hospitals’ sheets, scrubs, hospital gowns, and towels in retaliation for over $2.6 million in unpaid bills.

. . .

“I might take a position that you would might not expect me to take because of what we’ve just been through,” she began. “But I think that the word private equity—substitute private equity for Bank of America. Hospitals are capital intensive resources. They need investment dollars.” Even if all that “investment” kills patients, and ultimately the hospitals themselves.

[Celerity]

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