Plundering of America's Hospitals, Healthcare: For-Profit Investors, Private Equity Firms, PE

[appalachiablue]

How Wealthy Investors Got Rich Looting Needy Hospitals, Business Insider, March 11, 2024. Ed.

When hospitals sold off their land, investors got rich. Patients paid the price. In community after community, the hospitals keep closing. In 2018, it was Northside Regional Med. Ctr. in Youngstown, Ohio. In 2019, it was Ohio Valley Med. Ctr. in Wheeling, WVa., along with East Ohio Regional Hospital across the river in Martins Ferry, Ohio. That Nov., St. Luke's Medical Ctr., which had treated patients in Phoenix for more than a century, shut its doors.

In 2020, as the pandemic hit, it was one in Mass. and another in WVa. Followed by 4 more - in Calif., Pa., and Texas - over the next 3 yrs. Other hospitals are teetering on the brink. In 2022, Conemaugh Nason Med. Ctr. in Pa. announced it was ending OB-GYN deliveries, leaving some mothers-to-be to travel almost an hour to give birth. Last year, Glenwood Regional Med. Ctr. in Louisiana was ordered by the state to turn away patients because of inadequate supplies and staffing levels.

In addition to their financial struggles, all of the hospitals shared 3 things in common. They all served low-income communities that suffered from a lack of access to healthcare. They were all owned at various points by for-profit investors, including leading private-equity firms like Cerberus, Leonard Green, and Apollo. In a move that stripped the hospitals of one of their prime assets, owners had sold the land beneath the facilities to a little-known real-estate investor- Medical Properties Trust, MPT.

MPT, which has purchased some $16 Bill of hospital real estate over the past 2 decades, now bills itself as one of the world's largest owners of hospital beds.

For many of the hospitals, the deals proved disastrous. Once their real estate was sold to MPT, they were forced to pay rent on what had always been their own property. That added to the massive debt burdens already placed on the hospitals by their for-profit owners, deepening their financial woes. It also deprived Americans of desperately needed healthcare and put lives at risk - while enriching some of the world's wealthiest investors. "It's the biggest scam that almost no one knows about," says Rob Simone at the risk-mgmt. firm Hedgeye who has researched MPT's business dealings...
https://www.businessinsider.com/how-wealthy-investors-got-rich-looting-needy-hospitals-healthcare-system-2024-3

[mike_c]

1. in America, everything is monetized

Capitalism creates for-profit poverty, sickness, injury and death. It should not have its tentacles wrapped around humanitarian services like health care.

[appalachiablue]

3. Foster poor health & sickness, then profit off it. The American Way'? horror.

Like people said years ago, Americans would sell you the rope to hang them with.

Thanks for posting. Hospitals and healthcare are enormous, critical issues to reform, somehow.

[Simeon Salus]

2. Before the ACA, medical bills often had no solvent payer, so the business was unpredictably unprofitable

After previously uncovered people started getting medical insurance, most of their bills started to be paid reliably by their coverage, and most of the subsidized premiums paid reliably by the government.

All of a sudden, healthcare and healthcare insurance became an even more profitable enterprise.

Now come the pure profiteers, turning over the very furniture in search of loose change.

This is because the ACA relied on existing insurers profiting to keep everything moving forward. The ACA didn't anticipate vulture capitalist-run insurers gouging outrageously, emptying the medicine cabinet, and shifting the cost windows towards unsustainability. Trump's choice to deliberately mis-handle each and every domestic policy amplified the problem. As it turns out the few Trump administration successes (vast government spending on pandemic relief, vaccines, and unemployment) were victories they wouldn't brag about with MAGA supporters.

If we'd started off with the Medicare buy-in for all, we wouldn't have seen this predictable wave of profit taking. Healthcare costs may have gone down, because insurance companies couldn't have profited so handsomely.

[appalachiablue]

4. Very good post. The suffering, problems and stress that

expanded Medicare, universal health care could have eliminated or diminished if implemented here decades ago, like Canada and other countries.

It's tragic, and so many Americans don't know anything about the complex manipulations and profit seeking involved in the US healthcare system.

[Simeon Salus]

5. This sort of thing is happening across all sectors of the economy

A hollowing out of American industry by profiteers.

[appalachiablue]

6. IK, massive- retail, nursing homes, physician practices, RE, apart., single family...

Private Equity Is Gutting America and Getting Away with It, NYT, April 28, 2023.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/28/opinion/private-equity.html