The Big Medical Short Continues With Steward Health Care
Please read my post from April 24th of this year. I discussed how healthcare and private equity were similar to what happened to mortgages in 2008.
To sum up, the Big Medical Short is a coming storm where private equity tries to buy up medical practices, replaces doctors with non-doctors, and finally crashes the whole thing. It’s like the insanity where apes take over the world in Planet of the Apes only for Charlton Heston’s character to realize we did it to ourselves.
The plundering continues as Steward Health Care just filed for bankruptcy.
Bankrupt Steward Health Care has put all of its 31 U.S. hospitals up for sale, hoping to finalize transactions by the end of the summer to address its $9 billion in total liabilities, its attorneys said at a Tuesday court hearing in Houston.
That’s a loss of $9 billion f%cking dollars, folks! Try that at home.
They blamed this failure on ‘insufficient reimbursement’ from the Medicaid and Medicare programs, inflation, and high labor costs. Maybe. The following is from @realdocspeaks on X:
The real reason is that they took a series of safety net hospitals that were already struggling and gave them the full private equity treatment. First the system was loaded with debt to finance the purchase, then assets were stripped by selling the real estate and then leasing it back. When you sell the real estate you no longer have an asset, but only have debt per your lease. Steward then paid large dividends to investors and failed to pay bills at the hospitals. This led to reduced access for patients. The CEO is living large and purchased a private jet and two boats, one a yacht and the other a sport fishing boat that costs $ 5 Million to design. Enough is enough, it is time to ban Private Equity form purchasing, owning or operating health care entities. It is insane that physicians can’t own hospitals but PE can. This bankruptcy will hurt many vulnerable patients and we need to make sure this is the last time that PE is allowed to harm patient access.
Yeah, I think I can see the apes running the system soon.
The system brought this on itself. So glad I retired. Office, hospital practice and taking call became too much for me and I bailed out at age 64. Lived/worked in a rural area and couldn’t take vacations due to a mentally handicapped son. Saved up enough money that my financial advisor told me (from the next big city over) I could retire at 60. I hung on but couldn’t make age 65. Too much for me.
And the AAFP, after working non-stop for twenty-five years to destroy private practice, sheds a few crocodile tears.
It’s disgusting