The Steward Corporation, which owns 31 hospitals, declared bankruptcy a few weeks ago. In addition to the hospitals it owns in Texas, it also has eight hospitals in Massachusetts.
I have a personal interest in these events because one of the Steward holdings is St. Joseph’s, where I was born. It is the oldest hospital in Houston. At the time of my birth, St. Joseph’s was a Catholic hospital, staffed in large part by nuns wearing habits.
In recent years, the hospital has been owned by a series of private equity firms, who envisioned ways of making a profit while delivering high-quality healthcare.
In Massachusetts, state leaders were outraged by Steward’s bankruptcy and lambasted the private equity firms:
Steward’s troubles in Massachusetts have drawn the ire of political figures including U.S. Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Edward Markey, who have said the company’s previous private equity owners “sold (Steward) for parts” and “walked away with hundreds of millions of dollars.”
Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey said Monday that the state had been preparing for a possible bankruptcy filing. Despite the filing, she said, Steward hospitals will remain open and patients should keep their appointments.
“This situation stems from and is rooted in greed, mismanagement and lack of transparency on the part of Steward leadership in Dallas, Texas,” Healey said Monday. “It’s a situation that should never have happened and we’ll be working together to take steps to make sure this never happens again.”
No such outrage in Texas, where state leaders worship at the shrine of the market.
Julian Gill of The Houston Chronicle wrote about the failure of Steward.
St. Joseph Medical Center is poised to be sold after its Dallas-based owner, Steward Health Care, this week filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, according to court documents.
On Tuesday, the day after filing for Chapter 11 protections, Steward said in court documents that it plans to sell all of its hospital properties, which include St. Joseph and 30 other hospitals throughout the U.S. According to court documents, the company is “exploring a reorganization around a smaller footprint of hospitals.”
Representatives for St. Joseph and Steward could not immediately be reached for comment.
Upon announcing the bankruptcy Monday, Steward said day-to-day operations are expected to continue without interruption during the bankruptcy proceedings…
St. Joseph is Houston’s only downtown hospital and the oldest general hospital in the city. The hospital has more than 700 beds, officials previously told the Chronicle, and many of its patients are covered by Medicaid and Medicare. In addition to St. Joseph, the bankruptcy affects hospitals in Odessa, Big Spring, Port Arthur, and Texarkana…
St. Joseph has changed hands multiple times over the last two decades. In 2006, the hospital was sold to North Carolina-based Hospital Partners of America, Inc., after the previous owners, Christus Health, said it couldn’t afford to modernize the hospital’s aging buildings, according to earlier reports in the Chronicle. Hospital Partners initially invested heavily in the hospital but declared bankruptcy about two years later.
In 2011, a Tennessee-based company, Iasis Healthcare, acquired a majority interest in the hospital as part of the bankruptcy process. Iasis merged with Steward in 2017.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Only the tip of the iceberg, healthcare costs are skyrocketing, the “ownership” of healthcare is narrowing, healthcare is a product, like a car or a house or a bunch of carrots. With less and less competition , fewer choices, prices rise.
School districts and cities are forced to pay more and more to purchase healthcare for employees, and, if you’re lucky, retirees.
NYC is currently in a prolonged and contentious battle over employee, current and retiree, heath plans.
Will states and the Feds intervene?
With the clock ticking towards reducing Social Security and Medicare, a distinct possibility under a Republican regime, and health plans costs escalating the future may be ice floes for seniors
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The greed of private equity has no bounds. They use their extreme wealth to pick the bones of vulnerable companies. They have cornered the real estate market in some cities and driven up prices. First time home buyers and regular families cannot afford to compete against them. When they get into health and human services, they generally offer more costly inferior care as they cut staff and corners to make more profit. They have invested in prisons, nursing homes, hospitals, youth facilities, primary care practices, vet practices and schools. They also investing in ACO Reach, a scheme to monetize and privatize Medicare. They are also expanding into privatizing public water systems where they drive up and rates and create a dependent stranglehold on local communities. Private equity is a behemoth of greed driven wealth and exploitation.
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The business of education is not business. Nor is anything else closely related to public service.
And BTW, the Supreme Court of degenerate idiots, led to Mr. Out of Touch Judge Roberts, just opened the door for Trump to use his lawless goons to terrorize and even kill whomever they wish WITH IMPUNITY.
Trump lies all the time to anyone about anything. And he was ready to hang his own vice president. What makes those already-sleazy oligarchs think he won’t lie to them? Are they THAT naive and so greedy that they are willfully blind to the biggest con-man history has ever produced? Trump has no interest in anyone and even lusts after his own daughter.
Ask the oligarchs who fled Russia and who are still hunted by Putin’s own murderous goons–did you trust Putin once? CBK
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“Private Equity” = “Pirate Equity”
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The “answer” is a Biden victory and a Democratic Congress, and it’s up to you, and all the other “you’s” to donate and get involved, and getting involved beyond this site, we need every vote in every state, …
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Boston Globe: “SPOTLIGHT REPORT
Steward Health Care spent millions on surveillance of its critics — even amid financial crisisAs Steward Health Care struggled to provide services and pay vendors in many of its three dozen or so hospitals in Massachusetts and across the country, its executives spent millions on intelligence firms that provide research, intelligence-gathering, and surveillance services, according to emails, encrypted messages, and financial records reviewed by the Spotlight Team.
The surveillance was part of what Steward’s general counsel called a “spare no expenses mission” to gather dirt on people who were viewed as problematic by the hospital chain’s executives. And files show that the private intelligence firms discussed ways to potentially weaponize the compromising material, if necessary.
Read the full story from the Spotlight team. (Sorry about the paywall)
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Spotlight’s report on Steward’s “surveillance (of truth-tellers) was part of what Steward’s general counsel called a ‘spare no expenses mission’ to gather dirt on people who were viewed as problematic by the hospital chain’s executives.”
This . . . instead of perhaps thinking there might be a problem with THEM? This is beyond the pale and an egregious and false inflation their own personal worth, as well as a kiss-my-ring (or axx) state of mind.
Spotlight’s singular story only adds to the cumulate and now massive evidence that capitalist predators have normalized their own sense of privilege so much that their racism, sexism, and the coverall, classism, has become the law of consciousness for them–a hard-to-break-through ideology relaxing on a pile of money and supported by their libido dominandi (takeover ego-power). Under those mental circumstances, there is no room for reflection and especially for self-reflection or for a moral/ethical/spiritual come-to-Jesus moment.
Paraphrasing from Book X of “The Republic,” Plato talks about the little enfeebled ethical man inside one’s head who is being dragged around by the hair by the bully in us who has taken over one’s interior life. Does anyone recognize themselves in Plato’s story? They’ve not only “left the building,” they have left the species.
They’ve made philosophical and ethical abstractions of themselves, as if they are, by their own fraudulent definition, unrelated to their own human reality in history. CBK
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And Another Morally Bankrupt Columbus Ohio Charter School.
COLUMBUS, Ohio — A man who founded two Columbus charter schools pleaded guilty to conspiring to commit bank fraud in U.S. District Court Monday.
According to U.S. Attorney Kenneth Parker, 59-year-old Abdirizak Farah admitted to fraudulently using school funds to help purchase his home in New Albany. His sentencing will take place at a later hearing.
Farah founded Focus Learning Academy of Northern Columbus (FLANC) in 2007 and Focus Learning Academy of Central Columbus in 2020. He served as the superintendent of both schools.
The school in northern Columbus serves 700 students in kindergarten through eighth grade while the central Columbus serves pre-K through third grade students. An exact amount of students at that school was not provided.
Farah was also employed as a senior policy advisor for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.
Court documents say Farah purchased a $900,000 home on Lambton Park Road in New Albany in August 2020. Two days before his closing date, Farah reportedly requested a $265,000 wire from a Focus Learning bank account to another person and stated the purpose was for “learning materials.”
Farah submitted a letter to the bank handling his real estate closing the same day, saying he received $260,000 in gifted funds that were unrelated to the real estate transaction.
The next day, the person who received the wired funds in turn wired $260,000 to the title company handling the closing.
In the following days, several FLANC vendors reportedly made payments totaling approximately $265,000 to the person who assisted Farah, and that money was returned to FLANC.
As part of his plea, Farah will forfeit $265,000 to the United States. He faces up to 30 years in prison.
https://www.10tv.com/article/news/local/columbus-charter-school-founder-superintendent-pleads-guilty/530-16bfe592-0964-4a3b-852d-9eada972983b
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I may be wrong but this might be a Turkish Gulen school.
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A familiar story. In New Orleans, DePaul Psychiatric was purchased by HCA. As an education and later clinical director I witnessed the GREED as the State of Louisiana tried to create a Voucher System for SSI patients. HCA spun off its Northshore DePaul Hospital that operated for three years under a different private healthcare corporation. The moves were forced by privatization moves HMOs and PPOs that eventually dried up psychiatric care for youth and adolescents in America. The state of Louisiana was sued by the Federal Government as it’s Voucher scheme failed and nearly bankrupted the state. As mental heath care disappeared in White rural areas we began seeing numerious tradgic gun violence incidenses and with the Columbine incident shocking the nation. There were many others before Columbine, however, and the tradgedies motivated my dissertation: “School-wide discipline in Urban High Schools: Perceptions of Violence Prevention Strategies in Urban High Schools.” Columbine was 1999, and now more than 20 years later we continue seeing the effects of the Corporate Greed destruction the public/private/judicial mental health network across America. Think: Sandy Hook, Parkland, Uvalde, and many others! Yes, Corporate GREED.
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Disgraceful, Monty.
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