It turns out that Wall Street whiz kids took over a regional hospital in Florida, and turned it into a sewage and bat infested hellhole.
The Cerberus Capital Management backed Steward Healthcare Systems is circling the toilets, and medical care at the roughly three dozen medical institutions has descended into something that resembles the black hole of Calcutta:
The Rockledge Regional Medical Center reeks of raw sewage and bat guano. No one knew that bat shit was called “guano,” or that the pungent smell emanating from the fifth-floor intensive care unit had bat guano as a source, until last spring, when a delirious patient complained he was being attacked by a “giant grasshopper,” which turned out to be a bat, which turned out to be one of what four nurses told the Prospect was estimated to be at least five thousand more.
The exterminators alleged in court that Steward Health, Rockledge’s corporate owner, never paid them the $936,320 they were owed for “evicting” the bats from the hospital, which sits roughly eight miles southwest of the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. And so when, a week or two before Christmas, the sinks on the second floor began backing up with thick, black gunk that smelled like feces of the human sort, the hospital’s in-house maintenance staff tried to handle the job themselves.
For a few frenzied days, they snaked the drain trying to find the clog, at which point they realized that one of the pipes was leaking sewage from what seemed to be a massive hole. “There was literally poop everywhere: on the walls, on the floor, I know it was on the equipment,” says a nurse, who snapped some photos of the storage room where the maintenance crew had attempted to fix the building’s aging pipes. One photo of a sink partially filled with the mysterious black liquid showed up on the “Rockledge, Florida Community Updates & News” Facebook group, posted by the granddaughter of a stroke victim who had been admitted to the ICU. Somehow the photo disappeared, and Poopageddon
Rockledge is just one of 32 hospitals operated by Steward Health, which the Democratic mayor of Haverhill, Massachusetts, recently described by saying, “I think we are, perhaps, the victims of a Ponzi scheme.” Nurses say the hospital is chronically out of heart valves, urology lasers, Impella catheters, cardiac catheterization balloons, slings for lifting heavier patients, blood and urine test reagents, and most recently, prescription paper. Medical equipment used in lifesaving treatment has been repossessed, as have Pepsi machines and even, according to one account from an alleged longtime employee posted on Reddit, a quantity of Boar’s Head deli meats. And Steward has been sued by dozens of vendors and service providers, from landscaping services to revenue cycle managers to a long list of physician and nurse staffing agencies, for failing to pay its bills.never made it onto the local TV news, the way the bat infestation had.
Rockledge is just one of 32 hospitals operated by Steward Health, which the Democratic mayor of Haverhill, Massachusetts, recently described by saying, “I think we are, perhaps, the victims of a Ponzi scheme.” Nurses say the hospital is chronically out of heart valves, urology lasers, Impella catheters, cardiac catheterization balloons, slings for lifting heavier patients, blood and urine test reagents, and most recently, prescription paper. Medical equipment used in lifesaving treatment has been repossessed, as have Pepsi machines and even, according to one account from an alleged longtime employee posted on Reddit, a quantity of Boar’s Head deli meats. And Steward has been sued by dozens of vendors and service providers, from landscaping services to revenue cycle managers to a long list of physician and nurse staffing agencies, for failing to pay its bills.
………
In Steward’s early days, de la Torre told investors the company would disrupt health care by promoting a new business model that would “integrate” patients’ medical needs under one roof (and according to lawsuits and federal regulations, evade certain federal laws banning physician kickbacks and self-referrals). But by the time Steward bought Rockledge, a former administrator says, integrating networks was no longer a priority. The company immediately sold the hospital’s brand-new hospice center and home health care business and began shutting down or outsourcing the management of other departments to service providers. “It was pretty clear they were just there to move money around,” the former administrator, who left Steward less than a year ago, told the Prospect.
Gee, private equity and regulatory arbitrage destroying people's lives. Sounds a lot like PayPal, or Theranos, or college financial planning outfit Frank, or various cryptocurreny firms.
If the business model is based on evading regulations, the business is probably a fraud.
0 comments :
Post a Comment