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The health care system in Connecticut is collapsing, spurred by corporate greed while Senator Chris Murphy - whose job is to protect his most vulnerable constituents – looks the other way.
First some background. Prospect Medical Holding is a private equity group that purchases hospitals “with a core mission to provide quality, compassionate, and accessible healthcare.”
Off course this is a huge scam. Their goal is to buy hospitals, suck out the equity and pay investors and company executives gargantuan sums of money while useless politicians like Senator Chris Murphy look the other way and then feign outrage when his constituents are shafted.
How did this happen? Please bear with me because this is complicated. In 2010, a venture capital group, Leonard Green and Partners bought a 60% stake in Prospect Medical for $363,000,000 and assumed $158,000,000 in debt. They then went on a rampage, buying hospitals across the country. In Connecticut, they purchased Manchester Memorial Hospital and Rockville Hospital for $105,000,000 and Waterbury Hospital for an undisclosed amount.
These hospitals owned the land on which they were housed. But Prospect Medical Holding sold this land along with the land of other hospitals across the country for $1.4 billion to a REIT (Real Estate Investment Trust) called Medical Properties Trust (MPT). Thus, the hospital now had a huge expense they did not have before, monthly rent.
Meanwhile, Prospect Medical used the cash flow from these hospitals as collateral to borrow $1.1 billion dollars.
And what did they do with this money? If you said paid their executives huge amounts of money, go to the head of the class!
The CEO Sam Lee took home $128,000,000!
But now that the hospitals have to pay huge rents and the $1.1 billion debt has to be serviced. Where is this money going to come from?
If you said, but slashing services and care at these hospitals, go to the head the class again.
Rockland Hospital was once a thriving 102-bed hospital that served the working-class area of Vernon and its surroundings. Now it only offers an emergency room, one-day surgical service and behavioral health services.
At Manchester Memorial doctors have not been paid in months, nurses are short-staffed and working like dogs and as most of you may have guessed by now, Prospect Medical Holding stopped funding the pensions of the employees.
As stated by Rosemary Batt, a professor at Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations: “It’s such a brutal case of unabashed greed, We’re talking here about safety-net hospitals that are serving the poor, the unemployed, disproportionately people of color. They’re just doing this immoral sucking out of resources. That is beyond the pale.”
Yale Hospital is in the process of trying to buy these three hospitals from Prospect Medical Holdings, and perhaps rescue them, but the financial details have not been worked out and it has become a legal battle.
And where was Senator Murphy during this outrage? Dialing for dollars so that he has a $10,000,000 war chest making him practically invincible. He recently had a hearing where he was “shocked” that this occurred. But he had been a professional politician in Connecticut for decades. Where was he when this outrage was being perpetrated?
His courageous opponent, Republican nominee Matt Corey – a bar owner and window washer - is outraged too. But Matt brags in his e-mails if he raises $1,600 in a week. He does not have the cash to buy the TV time to educate the voters about Murphy’s dereliction of duty.
Too bad. If he did, he would beat Murphy easily.
But Big Money talks. The system worked when we doctors controlled patient care. But now we are just cogs in a greedy system where vultures sitting at computers are raping the system, the bought-off politicians look the other way and poor patients get the shaft.
