The Shameful Case of Steward Health Care

Things that should not be for profit: healthcare, education, utilities, prisons/correctional facilities, government. (feel free to add to this non-exhaustive list)

No bail-out though... That actually surprises me. They must have forgotten to invest in politicians.

I used to work at a Steward hospital as a psych nurse! Unbelievably bad - we had zero resources for patient care beyond pills (usually not even the correct, up-to-date protocol medicine). Psychiatric care is hard enough to deliver without being hobbled by the hospital's goal of taking as much insurance money as possible without delivering adequate supplies or staff wages.

On a fucking pike

I can't say much else than.... This is all so sickening and disgusting.

The sad thing is that this is pretty much one of the many standard operating proceedure with business in the US. My wife got laid off from THREE DIFFERENT JOBS because some idiot companies came in, bought the companies she worked for and then just stripped them dry, or sold the assets. The company would get bought, and the new company that bought it would just have a freakin tag sale and sell everything including the studs in the walls, while just booting the employees to the curb. What made this story so anger inducing was that this idiot and his company was doing this to HOSPITALS!! But what this idiot and his company did to those hospitals is very much standard operating procedure in business, and then, when anyone goes to the government to help with the situation for the employees and everyone who gets screwed over, they get countered by politicians and floods of money that call the former employees moochers and welfare kings and queens. It's always the poor's fault. These people don't give a damn about the employees and they'll fight like hell to prevent these people who lost their jobs from getting any help getting back to their feet.

They considered calling themselves "Charybdis Equity Management", after the whirlpool from ancient Greek myth into which anything that got too close would be pulled under into the depths, never to be seen again...but that, also, seemed a little too on-the-nose.

4:30 Monty Python told us that's what hospitals do with a straight face in 1989. Michael Palin's hospital administrator character is so proud of himself for being able to fudge numbers by selling the machine that goes "ping" and renting it back. Edit: excuse me, 1983

People have spent life in prison for far less.

Steward Healthcare bought one of the hospitals (Glenwood) where I live in Louisiana. My husband is an electrician who was doing work there. Rumors started floating around the hospital that vendors weren't getting paid. My husband brought this up to his boss, asking how many unpaid invoices they had. They stopped providing services at the hospital soon after. Within the last 2-3 years they had to shut down the NICU; you couldn't choose to have your baby there anymore. This caused me to go with St Francis when I became pregnant, and I had to have my doctor fight for me to be able to have a tubal ligation as they're a Catholic hospital and don't generally allow it. Steward fucking sucks.

Private equity should be regulated, and using leverage to pay shareholders and investors should be outlawed. And they should be forbidden to operate certain businesses, and be liable for bankruptcies.

As long as you don't make an investigative report into Boeing you will probably be fine.

FUCKING STEWARD HEALTHCARE

Norwood Hospital, just a few miles away from where I live, has sat vacant for years ... and years. And no one seems to know why.

1. Find someone with huge debt, but who still owns some assets. 2. Convince them you'll fix their debt by managing their assets. 3. Sell all assets to pay debt, keep part of it as a fee for your "service". 4. Disappear.

Greed destroys everything.

America is bleeding out.

I’m glad to know that my country’s hospitals truly care about my health and well-being!!!!!

Prisons, care facilities, hospitals - three things amongst many that should never, ever share a sentence with the words "for profit"!!.

I burst out laughing at the "pike" part. But it was sad laughter.