' How wealthy investors got rich looting America's needy hospitals
In community after community, the hospitals keep closing. In 2018, it was Northside Regional Medical Center in Youngstown, Ohio.
In 2019, it was Ohio Valley Medical Center in Wheeling, West Virginia, along with East Ohio Regional Hospital across the river in Martins Ferry, Ohio. That November, St. Luke's Medical Center, which had treated patients in Phoenix for more than a century, shut its doors.
In 2020, as the pandemic hit, it was one in Massachusetts and another in West Virginia. Followed by four more — in California, Pennsylvania, and Texas — over the next three years.
Other hospitals are teetering on the brink. In 2022, Conemaugh Nason Medical Center in Pennsylvania announced it was ending OB-GYN deliveries, leaving some mothers-to-be to travel almost an hour to give birth. Last year, Glenwood Regional Medical Center 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 three 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. And in a move that stripped the hospitals of one of their prime assets, the owners had sold the land beneath the facilities to a little-known real-estate investor called Medical Properties Trust. MPT, which has purchased some $16 billion of hospital real estate over the past two 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 — all while enriching some of the world's wealthiest investors. '
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Wendy Austin RN, MS, AOCN, COA, NEA-BC, FACHE |
2moI am so proud of having started my oncology nursing career under Linda Arenth in the Johns Hopkins Oncology Center 41 years ago. I too touched the Christ statue’s toe almost every day. I am thankful every day for the foundation which was lain for me at this phenomenal institution.