But wait…..their CEO used to be a heart surgeon. I thought “physician executives” were the best way to ensure that the focus is on quality instead of profiteering. 🙄🤷🏻♂️
Guy decided to turn to the Dark Side. He and the other top executives took hundreds of millions in profit and ran the hospitals into the ground. In Massachusetts, a woman died shortly after childbirth because they sent her to VIR for embolization but the VIR equipment had been repossessed due to failure of payment and a 2 million dollar outstanding balance owed to the company (Cook I believe). Also, it looks really bad when the CEO gets almost a 100 million dollar payout and buys a 40 million dollar yacht in the few years leading up to this implosion.
This to me is the most significant part of the story. The insurance companies have gotten too big and are ripping both patients and the rest of the industry off. Hopefully they attract some heat from the government otherwise I don’t see how the system doesn’t become a giant for-profit monopoly.
having a SURGEON as ceo?! terrible idea
Are business minded people are greedy.
They were, Cerberus
It would be terrible if something happened to it. Could sell it and it’d be a nice start for a new hospital .
Someone should let the orcas know where it is.
Do you work for a Steward hospital?
It’s psychopathic, it’s like they know that in some cases, these hospitals are the only ones in the middle of nowhere, and they just don’t care. I’m not a believer in the supernatural, but if there were a naturalistic definition of evil, these guys would fit the bill.
How is that the most significant part of the story? That Optum “might” buy not Steward Health, but Steward Health Medical Group, that’s not the whole company. Insurance companies are certainly problematic, but what we are witnessing here is outright theft and the ruination of communities across America at the hand of private equity. I noticed that Amyl liked your post, which just tells me, we must be looking at the world from a completely different lens. I hate to ask, but do you work for a PE backed ASC?
I do not work for PE. My point is that PE pillaging American companies of all stripes is well documented. What is relatively new is the ruins of those groups being gobbled into large hospital and insurer monopolies with questionable motives of their own. Perhaps this is all part of the plan?
Fair enough, maybe a good point. I am not sure that the pillaging of health care by PE is as widely understood as you suggest however. We have quite a few physicians on this board who believe PE is the David and against the Insurance Goliath, which is just insane. Like Upton once said "It's difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on not understanding it". But to your larger point, is PE in cahoots with Big Insurance to destroy health care in America? Kind of doubt it. Seems like these PE guys are just about money, nothing more. You could make the same case against Big Insurance I suppose, but like I said, I am always suspicious when folks like Amyl like to make the devil out to be Big Insurance while defending poor PE, and it's not just her, it's quite a few USAP executives on SDN who seem to make this point a lot.
This quote underlies a ton of the cognitive dissonance, misbeliefs, falsehoods, and hand-waving that physicians engage in to justify their role within the healthcare financial enterprise.
Yes - I'm thinking of this on more of a systems level. I think a lot of us realize that in some personal sense that we're being screwed, but we don't all understand how.
PE and insurance aren’t trying to destroy the American healthcare system, but they can see the writing on the wall. Single payer is coming eventually, maybe it’s 5 years maybe it’s 25, but it’s inevitable. They’re both just trying to extract as much capital as possible from the system as it currently exists while they still can.
In the process, accelerating the destruction of American healthcare
And by the way, they don’t care. At all. Being that they are rich, they basically feel like they will be able to get whatever they want no matter what in the future anyway, so who cares about how they do it.
Their responsibility is to the board of directors and shareholders, full stop. Wrongful death lawsuits are just a line item on the budget.
Please define "capitalistic greed." Does avarice not occur in other economic systems?
I thought he was off the coast of Ecuador because of the non-extradition treaty, or so I heard… absolute BANDIT.
Of course it does, it really depends on how a society views the role of capital. We just let it go hog wild, and basically allow it to dictate our collective priorities to a large extent.
Who runs St. Joes these days? PE?
Steward
Oh hell. Well that’s a done deal.
