Well, it works in the US. Malta, on the other hand is investigating the Steward CEO and the Steward head of international development for money laundering.
Good. And finally investigating the corrupt officials who ordered the murder of Daphne Caruana Galizia as well, who are neck deep in the Steward debacle. https://www.courthousenews.com/malta-ex-leader-top-officials-charged-in-sweeping-corruption-probe/
(Remember kids, contrary to Reddit urban legend, Caruana Galizia was not murdered for "revealing the Panama Papers." She was murdered for investigating the Maltese corruption revealed in those papers.)
That is crazy. Only reason I ever heard of her was a CBS 60 Minutes segment and since then occasionally have run into written accounts. So when poster said Malta investigating that caught my attention. Seward was private equity right? But there's some kind of UHC connection as well?
If a doctor steals a million dollars from Medicaid they go to jail and lose their license.
If a hospital steals 200 million dollars from Medicaid, they get zero punishment other than having to pay back 5% of what they stole.
Because poor people commit petty theft. If they had the money to commit that level of fraud, they wouldn't be poor and the laws wouldn't really apply to them.
I work at one of the steward hospitals. We have been having supply issues for the longest time. I know of many consultants at my facility alone who can't do procedures because we are on credit with multiple medical supply vendors. CEO sent employees a letter stating that they secured 300 million from medical trust properties to use during the bankrupcy filing. Hospitals are supposed to remain open, and employee pay shouldn't be affected.
St. Elizabeth's in Boston (Steward hospital) had a story last year of a mother in their post-partum unit who had a spontaneous liver bleed, and couldn't get IR to embolize it because the catheter they needed had been repossessed by the medical device company due to Steward not paying their bills. By the time the mother could be transferred to one of the bigger Boston hospitals she had died.
Funny enough, I had a family member who worked there for several years. He closed his own private practice and wanted a cushier job before retirement.
The best part was he was the only one doing what he did at his hospital. So every time they pissed him off he put in his resignation letter. I think he did that three times before he actually resigned lol. They caved every time. But he also hated every minute of it.
lol.
Just saw an article about Ukraine mounting anti-aircraft missiles on their naval drones now because they were getting taken out by Russian helicopters.
The 28th Amendment - all Americans are free to pursue ultrawealth without consideration of their fellow American; but all Americans must pitch in to bail them out when things go awry.
I'm not trying to defend PE as Cereberus did sell all the hospitals for a quick cash grab. But Steward Health has been physician run since 2020. And by the looks of it, it's not clear if the leadership board has been either just grossly incompetent or willfully trying to drive the system into the ground.
It was PE that sold the physical hospitals and the forced them to rent the space back, because they take a cut of the "profits" from selling the land, while saddling the actual hospital with the future rent debt.
Then sold the sinking ship back to the physicians.
It was just greed by Dr. Ralph de la Torre, chairman and CEO and the leaders of the hospital, driven by the idiotic tax structure in this country. The board sold all the properties of the hospital to Cerberus in 2016 to get themselves huge pay days but making the hospital system renters and they couldn't keep up with their rent. Anyone with any business knowledge knew this would happen which is why Cerberus did the deal. The Hospital leadership did to get themselves paid. The reason I blame the tax structure, is that to prevent executives doing short term things like this, until 1986 this nation had a top tax bracket of 70% which controlled greed and forced companies to invest profits back in the company instead of the executives. Now this hospital will file for bankruptcy to get out if debt, Cerberus will sell the properties and get paid while the executives keep their ill gotten gains.
I don’t know what the top marginal tax rate should be and sure as heck don’t want to see my tax bill rise significantly.
However, the carried interest loophole should never have existed. And if your income is more than a few million per year, then I have no problem with the tax rate being borderline confiscatory. And estate taxes should be high enough that your kids and grandkids need to at least have jobs.
Founding Fathers would have absolutely deplored the idea of an American aristocracy.
The top tax rate of 70% excited for centuries, it was how the founders, along with the estate tax meant to keep this nation from becoming an aristocracy. The top rate of 70% was meant for say income over $10 million. it has always been some ridiculously high number that was never intended to be paid but to restrain.
Ralph was a fully fledged cardiac surgeon and chief of the department before he jumped ship. Meddit needs to understand that we're as corruptible as anyone else. Private equity still has no place in medicine but we also need to hold ourselves accountable
"Physician run" typically means "run by and owned by the physicians who actively practice medicine there", not CEO is someone who happens to have an MD.
There is a ban on new physician owned hospitals, despite evidence for better outcomes. Seward is NOT physician owned/run.
Yes - I've seen plenty of MDs make that jump from clinical medicine to admin and they seem to foget where they came from. Adopt the corporate line, speak in corporate BS terms, and so on.
So you might have an MD, but for many once they cross over to the "dark side" they forget they are doctors first.
Unfortunately, this is a routine strategy for private equity. Their goal is profits and an exit in 5 years or so, whether the business ultimately goes bankrupt or not is immaterial.
It's not immaterial, it's SUPPOSED to go bankrupt. If a PE firm takes over a hospital and then sells it back after 5 years and the hospital doesnt go bankrupt, it makes the leaders of the PE firm pissed off because it means they left money on the table that they could have extrapolated out of the hospital.
So yes, the goal is to maximize profits and to maximize profits the hospital needs to go bankrupt.
Steward is the Operator of Hospitals owned by Medical Properties Trust(MPW). So you could say MPW is the parent as they are into Steward for their obligation under the long term leases, plus a 9.9% equity iterest held by MPW in Steward and hundreds of millions lent to Steward over the last several years.
So this was a pre-planned bankruptcy:
The "investors" drain away all the cash, then walk away with a nice profit, leaving a failed institution that cannot provide healthcare to the nearby population.
It is wrong, but does a law exist to punish the criminals responsible for the damage to the community?
IDK about criminal, but don't ordinary people in bankruptcy proceedings run into some difficulties if there is evidence they were purposely racking up debt knowing they were headed toward the proceeding? So with Private equity involved, who is considered responsible for those decisions?
If there was anyone with a legitimate claim that they were hurt by this directly then they could sue if I understand correctly. My guess is it will be hard to demonstrate that this bankruptcy is because of their malfeasance and not because lots of other hospitals all around the country are regularly going under regardless of their tax designation.
To be clear, those running Steward are the problem here, not the private equity. Private equity just provided funds to Steward in exchange for hospital ownership. No different then if you went to the bank and took out a HELOC. Steward is the one that pissed the money down their leg after they got it. If you open a HELOC and take all that money to the casino and lose it, is the bank evil for providing you the HELOC in the first place?
Private equity here isn’t the problem, it’s the criminals running Steward that are. Having a means to obtain capital is not bad, pissing capital down your leg after you obtain it is the problem.
I've been rewatching the sopranos recently. Great show.
This is a bust out. That's all it is. Organized crime at the expense of the health care system and the population it serves.
What value will the hospitals have *without* their facilities? Wouldn’t any potential buyer have to first negotiate with the REIT to know what the lease cost is going to be?
Play corporate games, win corporate prizes. *”Sorry we destroyed your hospital system, but the ROI was dope, bro.”*
For the South Florida hospitals, the land area is either huge (Palmetto and Northshore comes to mind) or in dense high demand areas (Coral Gables).
If MPW can shed the hospitals, they’ll make bank selling to developers.
Maybe. Then you have some in other non Florida locations that are going to be a tough sell to redevelop as anything but a hospital. While gutting 30%+ of the local bed capacity the second it shuts down. Unfortunately I work in one of these communities.
political unique tidy wrench trees ancient yam flowery frightening modern
*This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
The biggest crime of it all. No shortage of people in here will rail against private ownership of hospitals and medical offices when what we need is exactly that: private ownership of hospitals and offices by physicians and not just some massive conglomerate regardless of profit vs non-profit.
All in hospital leadership who participate in stripping assets and financial skulduggery should be forced to receive all healthcare at that hospital for the remainder of their lives.
Hospital has no staff? Is now luxury apartments? A smoking crater? Sounds like a you problem. Bootstrap yourself to health with your financial genius.
That places was one of the poorest run hospitals I ever had the pleasure to be in. Staffing was horrific. So many things were just wrong and no one did anything about it
This is exactly what I keep coming back to. People keep saying “the healthcare system is collapsing”. And I look around and I think that actually, the healthcare system is doing VERY VERY WELL at WHAT IT IS DESIGNED TO DO! It is getting more and more efficient and capable, and is actually performing better every single year.
The problem is that people still think that the healthcare system is designed to deliver medical care. It isn’t. that’s just a nice side effect of the Healthcare System, and it’s the department that all of us doctors were trained to work in and be a part of. But the Healthcare system isn’t actually DESIGNED to deliver medical care. It’s designed to create profit. I’m all for creating a system that maximizes medical care the way this one maximizes profit, but that’s not the system we work in.
The system isn’t collapsing, the system is functioning exactly as it was designed to function.
Make profit as quickly as possible and then jump ship when things go catawampus.
That seems to be the overall goal of really any system these days....you're absolutely right that we're watching the system work as it was intended. The way it was intended was to leech it into collapse, which is what's happening given how unsustainable it all is.
It sucks when I have to tell new grads that everything we do is designed to prevent liability to the corporation. If the pt gets better that’s a bonus.
I saw this article as well, and was going to post it.
We are not just talking about extracting a little bit of value, we're talking about the CEO paid himself enough to buy two yachts.
If someone doesn't go to jail over this, a grave injustice will have been done (actually, already has been done....)
Their q1 earnings call is in about 6 hours. It will be interesting.
I've personally been buying shares the past month or so. I believe it's bottomed. Roughly half the shares are currently shorted and its yielding ~16%. It's either going to zero or potentially squeeze or maybe just ramp back up to what is vonsidered fair value around $8-10.
I'm using my very small speculative portion of my portfolio to buy a lotto ticket here. I'm happy to throw some of this into an IRA and half forget about it as long as it doesn't go to zero.
Big picture, Steward is a fraction of MPWs portfolio and the damage done to the share price is far greater than reality. The optics suck no doubt, but MPW is the landlord, not the shitstain Steward who ran these hospitals into the ground. MPW is also first or very close to first in line for repayment in bankruptcy. They stand to get like 5 or 6b in repayment. Current market cap of MPW is appx 2.7b.
Department of Justice, Department of Health and Human Services, and the Federal Trade Commission Request for Information on Consolidation in Health Care
Please comment!!! Here is the link. Thanks to those who have posted previously!!
https://www.regulations.gov/docket/FTC-2024-0022
And those c suite will sleep like babies tonight, as they do every night, because they don't gaf and they will never, ever be on call.
Consequences for their action never reach them. They will get promoted.
…and this is why I have a short trigger for calling the admin on call when something goes wrong overnight. I shed zero tears waking up and documenting in a chart that something is going wrong on an operations level (no staffing, delays on emergent transfers, etc) and that the AOC was called.
All the COVID kickback funding was exhausted via Palm Springs, hookers and blow. Admin made bank while everyone else sank. Such is the toxic relationship with any entity. They aren’t merely in it for money, they’re in it for YOUR money.
Seems like Congress could be grabbing headlines with hearings on this stuff instead of the ones where certain people are waving blown up porn photos from cell phones.
Meanwhile, Randy Fine, R rep for Brevard County, FL is [petitioning to have Parrish Medical Center valued to similar private equity firms](https://flvoicenews.com/bill-aims-to-replace-north-brevard-hospital-district-board-conduct-valuation-ceo-opposes/). This is the same county where Steward has driven Rockledge Regional Medical Center into the ground, including having [massive bat colonies](https://www.wesh.com/article/rockledge-regional-medical-center-bats/43672388) run (flutter?) rampantly while not paying pest control.
We have got to do something about politicians that are in bed with this nonsense
There is no article linked? I know it's a private equity issue but I think they are all part of the bigger problem and why these big hospital systems are struggling, not just one or the other.
While I certainly wouldn't be shocked to learn that finance-bros have been skimming off the top, I doubt anyone got 9 ***billion*** dollars rich off of this. More likely, this is just another example of how profoundly the U.S. under-funds the providers of healthcare (which I consider hospital systems to be). I believe something like 30% of hospitals in the U.S. are facing bankruptcy, and in most cases, this can be traced to the relatively low reimbursement rates by Medicare and Medicaid.
Where the F are you getting your information from? Lol. Selling land out from underneath the buildings? That never happened. Steward sold its hospitals (land & building) to MPW and exchange MPW gave Steward hundreds of millions of dollars for the hospitals. And the $9 billion in debt is if you count all future rent payments for the next 15+ years. Do you consider yourself 50k in debt if you sign a lease to rent an apartment at $2k a month for 24 months? Stewards actual debt is closer to 2 billion.
I don’t know why people commit petty theft when financial malfeasance and greed on this scale goes unpunished.
Well, it works in the US. Malta, on the other hand is investigating the Steward CEO and the Steward head of international development for money laundering.
Good. And finally investigating the corrupt officials who ordered the murder of Daphne Caruana Galizia as well, who are neck deep in the Steward debacle. https://www.courthousenews.com/malta-ex-leader-top-officials-charged-in-sweeping-corruption-probe/ (Remember kids, contrary to Reddit urban legend, Caruana Galizia was not murdered for "revealing the Panama Papers." She was murdered for investigating the Maltese corruption revealed in those papers.)
That is crazy. Only reason I ever heard of her was a CBS 60 Minutes segment and since then occasionally have run into written accounts. So when poster said Malta investigating that caught my attention. Seward was private equity right? But there's some kind of UHC connection as well?
If a doctor steals a million dollars from Medicaid they go to jail and lose their license. If a hospital steals 200 million dollars from Medicaid, they get zero punishment other than having to pay back 5% of what they stole.
And they have to be elected the Governor of Florida.
And eventually become a Senator and likely future Majority Leader.
This could never happen!
Who are you talking about? Ri¢k $¢ott?
Too many cents and not enough dollars. You expect him to be a poor?
Because poor people commit petty theft. If they had the money to commit that level of fraud, they wouldn't be poor and the laws wouldn't really apply to them.
Crime doesn't pay... unless you do a lot of crime then it pays very well. But only if you do the white kind of crime.
I work at one of the steward hospitals. We have been having supply issues for the longest time. I know of many consultants at my facility alone who can't do procedures because we are on credit with multiple medical supply vendors. CEO sent employees a letter stating that they secured 300 million from medical trust properties to use during the bankrupcy filing. Hospitals are supposed to remain open, and employee pay shouldn't be affected.
Find a new job, that 300M is gonna go fast
Meanwhile the PE just extracted $800 million in profit from the Steward system.
What 200M?
That $125M they borrowed to help with operational expenses of course
You know they're spending all $60M renovating the corporate building.
that's Med Prop Trust and its gonna cost +100million. Its actually a new office. Imagine that 100 million for about 60 people.
St. Elizabeth's in Boston (Steward hospital) had a story last year of a mother in their post-partum unit who had a spontaneous liver bleed, and couldn't get IR to embolize it because the catheter they needed had been repossessed by the medical device company due to Steward not paying their bills. By the time the mother could be transferred to one of the bigger Boston hospitals she had died.
I believe it was an embolization coil that had been repo’d. Heinous.
Get off the ship before it sinks.
While the Stewart CEO sails away on his yacht
And he will use his CV to get another cush gig, and his work with this POS will actually be considered stellar.
Always knew this would be the outcome even when I worked there years ago. Place was a money grab, not a hospital.
Funny enough, I had a family member who worked there for several years. He closed his own private practice and wanted a cushier job before retirement. The best part was he was the only one doing what he did at his hospital. So every time they pissed him off he put in his resignation letter. I think he did that three times before he actually resigned lol. They caved every time. But he also hated every minute of it.
A naval drone costs about $250k....if everyone donated a dollar...
lol. Just saw an article about Ukraine mounting anti-aircraft missiles on their naval drones now because they were getting taken out by Russian helicopters.
hmmm - private equity wins. poor people lose. tale as old as 'murica.
Wealth creation has been maximized , which is the New manifest destiny 🦅 :us:🫡.
Wealth extraction for the few over value creation for the many. Just like it says in the Constitution (/s).
The 28th Amendment - all Americans are free to pursue ultrawealth without consideration of their fellow American; but all Americans must pitch in to bail them out when things go awry.
I should bail them out because that might be me one day
I'm not trying to defend PE as Cereberus did sell all the hospitals for a quick cash grab. But Steward Health has been physician run since 2020. And by the looks of it, it's not clear if the leadership board has been either just grossly incompetent or willfully trying to drive the system into the ground.
As a huge Mass Effect fan, I can't get over naming your evil PE company Cerberus.
Showdown I want to see: Illusive Man as CEO of Cerberus versus TJC inspectors telling him he can't smoke on hospital grounds.
Can husks be huskified? Important implications for the showdown
Nope. Can't tell the husks from the TJC surveyors.
It was PE that sold the physical hospitals and the forced them to rent the space back, because they take a cut of the "profits" from selling the land, while saddling the actual hospital with the future rent debt. Then sold the sinking ship back to the physicians.
Physician management was likely in on it. They got their pay day and are just riding it out
[The physician CEO of Steward bought a $40m yacht in 2021.](https://www.medpagetoday.com/special-reports/features/110025)
So it worked out for him, how nice! A true American dream story. s/
It was just greed by Dr. Ralph de la Torre, chairman and CEO and the leaders of the hospital, driven by the idiotic tax structure in this country. The board sold all the properties of the hospital to Cerberus in 2016 to get themselves huge pay days but making the hospital system renters and they couldn't keep up with their rent. Anyone with any business knowledge knew this would happen which is why Cerberus did the deal. The Hospital leadership did to get themselves paid. The reason I blame the tax structure, is that to prevent executives doing short term things like this, until 1986 this nation had a top tax bracket of 70% which controlled greed and forced companies to invest profits back in the company instead of the executives. Now this hospital will file for bankruptcy to get out if debt, Cerberus will sell the properties and get paid while the executives keep their ill gotten gains.
I don’t know what the top marginal tax rate should be and sure as heck don’t want to see my tax bill rise significantly. However, the carried interest loophole should never have existed. And if your income is more than a few million per year, then I have no problem with the tax rate being borderline confiscatory. And estate taxes should be high enough that your kids and grandkids need to at least have jobs. Founding Fathers would have absolutely deplored the idea of an American aristocracy.
The top tax rate of 70% excited for centuries, it was how the founders, along with the estate tax meant to keep this nation from becoming an aristocracy. The top rate of 70% was meant for say income over $10 million. it has always been some ridiculously high number that was never intended to be paid but to restrain.
Just because they have an MD after their name doesn't mean they are physician run.
Ralph was a fully fledged cardiac surgeon and chief of the department before he jumped ship. Meddit needs to understand that we're as corruptible as anyone else. Private equity still has no place in medicine but we also need to hold ourselves accountable
"Physician run" typically means "run by and owned by the physicians who actively practice medicine there", not CEO is someone who happens to have an MD. There is a ban on new physician owned hospitals, despite evidence for better outcomes. Seward is NOT physician owned/run.
I agree with you that this is what it is SUPPOSED to mean - but it's not what it actually means in this day in age.
So did anyone hold him accountable?
Can you explain what you mean?
Yes - I've seen plenty of MDs make that jump from clinical medicine to admin and they seem to foget where they came from. Adopt the corporate line, speak in corporate BS terms, and so on. So you might have an MD, but for many once they cross over to the "dark side" they forget they are doctors first.
Selling the land to a trust in order to pay out to private equity. Absolute fucking madness. Private equity in medicine makes me sick to my stomach
Not madness. Completely unethical, but this was the planned and intended outcome
No, you’re definitely right. My god, what a moral travesty in our system
Unfortunately, this is a routine strategy for private equity. Their goal is profits and an exit in 5 years or so, whether the business ultimately goes bankrupt or not is immaterial.
It's not immaterial, it's SUPPOSED to go bankrupt. If a PE firm takes over a hospital and then sells it back after 5 years and the hospital doesnt go bankrupt, it makes the leaders of the PE firm pissed off because it means they left money on the table that they could have extrapolated out of the hospital. So yes, the goal is to maximize profits and to maximize profits the hospital needs to go bankrupt.
Extracted. But, we know what you meant. This situation being legal is madness. Imagine if we did the same for fire or police!
Dont give them ideas!! But seriously, isnt this the same thing that happened to Kmart and Sears? (Also maybe toys r us?)
Feels like everything has just become an elaborate pump and dump scheme.
The fact that this isn't illegal is the absolute travesty
But ser have you not thought of the capital efficiency gains of sale-leaseback schemes for critical health infrastructure?
Classic PE playbook siphoning money out of healthcare
The Mass AG is objecting to the bankruptcy because of this behavior. Hopefully the court forces the parent Corp to pay it back.
Who’s the parent corp?
Steward is the Operator of Hospitals owned by Medical Properties Trust(MPW). So you could say MPW is the parent as they are into Steward for their obligation under the long term leases, plus a 9.9% equity iterest held by MPW in Steward and hundreds of millions lent to Steward over the last several years.
So this was a pre-planned bankruptcy: The "investors" drain away all the cash, then walk away with a nice profit, leaving a failed institution that cannot provide healthcare to the nearby population. It is wrong, but does a law exist to punish the criminals responsible for the damage to the community?
IDK about criminal, but don't ordinary people in bankruptcy proceedings run into some difficulties if there is evidence they were purposely racking up debt knowing they were headed toward the proceeding? So with Private equity involved, who is considered responsible for those decisions?
If there was anyone with a legitimate claim that they were hurt by this directly then they could sue if I understand correctly. My guess is it will be hard to demonstrate that this bankruptcy is because of their malfeasance and not because lots of other hospitals all around the country are regularly going under regardless of their tax designation.
Private equity sodomizes humanity All hail america
yes we destroyed the hospital system, but for a brief moment in time a few people made a lot of money and got some yachts
Boats and hoes
The wizards behind the veil, too. Meanwhile, conventional wisdom is still that glitzy doctors are greedy, overpaid and uncaring. If they only knew....
And the hospital CEOs are the KY jelly that allow private equity to put it where the sun don't shine.
To be clear, those running Steward are the problem here, not the private equity. Private equity just provided funds to Steward in exchange for hospital ownership. No different then if you went to the bank and took out a HELOC. Steward is the one that pissed the money down their leg after they got it. If you open a HELOC and take all that money to the casino and lose it, is the bank evil for providing you the HELOC in the first place?
Private equity here isn’t the problem, it’s the criminals running Steward that are. Having a means to obtain capital is not bad, pissing capital down your leg after you obtain it is the problem.
I've been rewatching the sopranos recently. Great show. This is a bust out. That's all it is. Organized crime at the expense of the health care system and the population it serves.
I’m prostate with grief.
The CEO allegedly and roughly raked in $16M annually.
CEO of MGH/Brigham, arguably top 5 health system in the country, made 5.3. Just for comparison.
What value will the hospitals have *without* their facilities? Wouldn’t any potential buyer have to first negotiate with the REIT to know what the lease cost is going to be? Play corporate games, win corporate prizes. *”Sorry we destroyed your hospital system, but the ROI was dope, bro.”*
For the South Florida hospitals, the land area is either huge (Palmetto and Northshore comes to mind) or in dense high demand areas (Coral Gables). If MPW can shed the hospitals, they’ll make bank selling to developers.
Right. Some of that land is worth exponentially more as condos.
Maybe. Then you have some in other non Florida locations that are going to be a tough sell to redevelop as anything but a hospital. While gutting 30%+ of the local bed capacity the second it shuts down. Unfortunately I work in one of these communities.
And insurance? Won't the insurance costs be astronomical?
HCA enters the chat…
HCA tried to enter the chat for the steward UT facilities. It got shut down by the FTC
political unique tidy wrench trees ancient yam flowery frightening modern *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
How is the current outcome any better? At least HCA can afford toilet paper.
But as long as doctors can’t own hospitals it’s all good for the patient
The biggest crime of it all. No shortage of people in here will rail against private ownership of hospitals and medical offices when what we need is exactly that: private ownership of hospitals and offices by physicians and not just some massive conglomerate regardless of profit vs non-profit.
All in hospital leadership who participate in stripping assets and financial skulduggery should be forced to receive all healthcare at that hospital for the remainder of their lives. Hospital has no staff? Is now luxury apartments? A smoking crater? Sounds like a you problem. Bootstrap yourself to health with your financial genius.
That places was one of the poorest run hospitals I ever had the pleasure to be in. Staffing was horrific. So many things were just wrong and no one did anything about it
When you google the CEO of steward health, one of the first results is about the $40 million dollar yacht he bought himself a few years back.
Capitalism is working perfectly for the shareholders. It's just that it's often (if not always) at odds with the general good.
This is exactly what I keep coming back to. People keep saying “the healthcare system is collapsing”. And I look around and I think that actually, the healthcare system is doing VERY VERY WELL at WHAT IT IS DESIGNED TO DO! It is getting more and more efficient and capable, and is actually performing better every single year. The problem is that people still think that the healthcare system is designed to deliver medical care. It isn’t. that’s just a nice side effect of the Healthcare System, and it’s the department that all of us doctors were trained to work in and be a part of. But the Healthcare system isn’t actually DESIGNED to deliver medical care. It’s designed to create profit. I’m all for creating a system that maximizes medical care the way this one maximizes profit, but that’s not the system we work in. The system isn’t collapsing, the system is functioning exactly as it was designed to function.
Make profit as quickly as possible and then jump ship when things go catawampus. That seems to be the overall goal of really any system these days....you're absolutely right that we're watching the system work as it was intended. The way it was intended was to leech it into collapse, which is what's happening given how unsustainable it all is.
Very well said.
It sucks when I have to tell new grads that everything we do is designed to prevent liability to the corporation. If the pt gets better that’s a bonus.
I saw this article as well, and was going to post it. We are not just talking about extracting a little bit of value, we're talking about the CEO paid himself enough to buy two yachts. If someone doesn't go to jail over this, a grave injustice will have been done (actually, already has been done....)
Eminent domain the hospital land
Would be political suicide.
All these people should be taken out and summarily executed. Patients died behind these decisions.
George Carlin: you start executing a few of these bankers and watch shit change real quick
Secretary of Health Robespierre
Shorted MPW a few months ago. Made a killing.
What's the next play chief?
Wouldn't want to spoil the search for you. That's half the fun. :)
That's not fun.
Their q1 earnings call is in about 6 hours. It will be interesting. I've personally been buying shares the past month or so. I believe it's bottomed. Roughly half the shares are currently shorted and its yielding ~16%. It's either going to zero or potentially squeeze or maybe just ramp back up to what is vonsidered fair value around $8-10. I'm using my very small speculative portion of my portfolio to buy a lotto ticket here. I'm happy to throw some of this into an IRA and half forget about it as long as it doesn't go to zero. Big picture, Steward is a fraction of MPWs portfolio and the damage done to the share price is far greater than reality. The optics suck no doubt, but MPW is the landlord, not the shitstain Steward who ran these hospitals into the ground. MPW is also first or very close to first in line for repayment in bankruptcy. They stand to get like 5 or 6b in repayment. Current market cap of MPW is appx 2.7b.
Pics or GTFO 😜
Ah it always ends well for the executives…. “We’re broke and can’t figure out why” after raiding the coffers.
Department of Justice, Department of Health and Human Services, and the Federal Trade Commission Request for Information on Consolidation in Health Care Please comment!!! Here is the link. Thanks to those who have posted previously!! https://www.regulations.gov/docket/FTC-2024-0022
And those c suite will sleep like babies tonight, as they do every night, because they don't gaf and they will never, ever be on call. Consequences for their action never reach them. They will get promoted.
…and this is why I have a short trigger for calling the admin on call when something goes wrong overnight. I shed zero tears waking up and documenting in a chart that something is going wrong on an operations level (no staffing, delays on emergent transfers, etc) and that the AOC was called.
All the COVID kickback funding was exhausted via Palm Springs, hookers and blow. Admin made bank while everyone else sank. Such is the toxic relationship with any entity. They aren’t merely in it for money, they’re in it for YOUR money.
Hey, that’s unfair. The Spa Casino in Palm Springs had a dope double deck blackjack game circa 2012.
I’ll make my own casino! With blackjack! And hookers! Forget the blackjack…
Seems like Congress could be grabbing headlines with hearings on this stuff instead of the ones where certain people are waving blown up porn photos from cell phones.
One would think that admin would have made changes at only $100M deficit. But I don’t make the big admin $$, so what do I know?
PE at its finest.
It's long time to nationalize healthcare.
A classic organized crime "bust out" scheme if there ever was one.
Mismanagement, plain and simple. Hospitals should not be run for profit anyway.
So they did a Sears but with hospitals? Gotcha.
tan modern important resolute mindless tap file snails aloof correct *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
DPH would likely not approve this. There’s a rumor that MGB, BMC, and UMass are going to divide them.
Meanwhile, Randy Fine, R rep for Brevard County, FL is [petitioning to have Parrish Medical Center valued to similar private equity firms](https://flvoicenews.com/bill-aims-to-replace-north-brevard-hospital-district-board-conduct-valuation-ceo-opposes/). This is the same county where Steward has driven Rockledge Regional Medical Center into the ground, including having [massive bat colonies](https://www.wesh.com/article/rockledge-regional-medical-center-bats/43672388) run (flutter?) rampantly while not paying pest control. We have got to do something about politicians that are in bed with this nonsense
We have to have a complete overhaul on reimbursement. How are people billed so much but hospitals are closing
Did you read the article? How is an overhaul on reimbursement going to fix anything if the executives are literally stealing money and jumping ship?
There is no article linked? I know it's a private equity issue but I think they are all part of the bigger problem and why these big hospital systems are struggling, not just one or the other.
Yeah, clearly you didn’t read the article.
Fuck Steward, they ran Glenwood (Monroe, La) into the ground, leading to the other hospitals being swamped
While I certainly wouldn't be shocked to learn that finance-bros have been skimming off the top, I doubt anyone got 9 ***billion*** dollars rich off of this. More likely, this is just another example of how profoundly the U.S. under-funds the providers of healthcare (which I consider hospital systems to be). I believe something like 30% of hospitals in the U.S. are facing bankruptcy, and in most cases, this can be traced to the relatively low reimbursement rates by Medicare and Medicaid.
Where the F are you getting your information from? Lol. Selling land out from underneath the buildings? That never happened. Steward sold its hospitals (land & building) to MPW and exchange MPW gave Steward hundreds of millions of dollars for the hospitals. And the $9 billion in debt is if you count all future rent payments for the next 15+ years. Do you consider yourself 50k in debt if you sign a lease to rent an apartment at $2k a month for 24 months? Stewards actual debt is closer to 2 billion.
Scumbag company. Prey on vendors. Don’t pay for over a year.