The New Yorker:

Health insurers and hospitals increasingly treat patients less as humans in need of care than consumers who generate profit.

By Dhruv Khullar

In 2010, a private-equity firm called Cerberus Capital Management, which is named for the three-headed dog that is said to guard the underworld, bought six Catholic hospitals in Massachusetts and christened the chain Steward Health Care. The state’s attorney general blessed the deal on multiple conditions, including that, during a five-year review period, the hospitals stayed open and their workers stayed employed. A few months after the period ended, however, Steward started selling the land on which the hospitals stood. A $1.25-billion-dollar deal, in 2016, helped to finance more acquisitions. Many facilities, asked to pay rent on land they’d previously owned, struggled.

According to a recent report published by Massachusetts Senator Ed Markey’s office, which covers the period between 2017 and 2024, some Steward facilities had to forgo key investments in staffing, surgical equipment, elevator repairs, and even clean linens. Patients increasingly languished in emergency rooms; many left without receiving care; and mortality rates for common conditions climbed sharply. (Steward has argued that its death rates were better than expected, given the underlying health status of the patients it cared for.) A hospital in Florida developed a bat infestation, and another, in Texas, was cited for placing potentially suicidal patients in rooms with materials with which they could hang themselves. Employees at Steward’s Carney Hospital, in Massachusetts, began calling their workplace “Carnage” hospital. (Cerberus’s ownership ended in 2020, and the firm claims that the quality issues at Steward are “overwhelmingly related to the post-Cerberus ownership period.”)

Go to link