Tag: medicine

Veritext Holding Company Leonard Green & Partners Is Reportedly Good With Looting Communities for the Bottom Line

I’ve written a bit about the private equity model and its impact on medicine before. Basically these larger parent companies can load up their held companies with debt, sell them off for profit, and the result is that the rich get richer, the companies get weaker, and the stakeholders — consumers, workers, and communities, suffer. There’s also that whole Take Med Back Movement with Dr. Mitch Li where they’re saying there’s a doctor shortage as an excuse not to staff doctors in emergency rooms because “expensive.”

Eileen O’Grady, then with the Private Equity Stakeholder Project, and who I’d really love to talk to someday, put it out in the open that Prospect Medical Holdings’ parent company, Leonard Green & Partners, basically loaded the company up with debt, sold it off, and left it in a position of needing to cut corners to survive. It was called “raiding the safety net.” Looting the hospitals meant to help the poor.

This is a legitimate way of making money. Where many court reporters lead lives of professional excellence and high standards, there are forces looking to make money off of effectively crippling companies with debt. Your lifelong career is a number on a sheet to some people. That’s a reality I don’t run away from. We need to own it if we are to control our own destinies and destinations.

Healthcare, court transcripts, doesn’t matter. The end is the same: Using a held company to make money, no matter the cost. No matter who it hurts. No matter whose job is on the line. No matter that the science and public opinion says and implies that impacts would be worse for minorities and the poor.

This is, in part, why I publish. If we can get to a point where legislators are able to openly acknowledge that certain things businesses are doing is harmful to the long-term health and stability of society — for example, weakening the financial condition of hospitals for profit — we might be able to get legislatures to act and put guardrails on this business activity, or fund executive agencies that investigate rampant fraud and misinformation more aggressively. We might be able to go from lawsuits after the fact to preventative measures.

At the end of the day corporations are wealth extraction machines. They have a legal duty to make money for their shareholders. Sometimes violating the law is the cost of doing business. Has Leonard Green & Partners itself or its subsidiaries violated the law? Seems likely.

This behavior is profitable and will continue for as long as society allows.

Addendum:

I was later told that CVC acquired Veritext sometime in 2010. This seems plausible because Leonard and CVC seem familiar with each other. It’s also possible they did what they’ve done in the past and maintained some stake while selling the majority.

Our Shortage is Not the Only One Being Exaggerated

A good friend passed me this New York Times opinion article, “We Know the Real Cause of the Crisis in our Hospitals. It’s Greed.” In brief, nurses are being pushed out under the guise there’s a shortage. In truth, their working conditions are just horrible and they’re moving on for greener pastures. This blurb from the article says it all.

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is img_4369-1024x685.jpg
Nurses are fighting the same war as stenographers. If that doesn’t give you pause, keep reading.

Funny enough, this is happening in emergency medicine too. Emergency physicians are being pushed out for nurse practitioners, as told to me by Dr. Mitch Li of Take Medicine Back. TBM’s rallying call? “Taking back contracts, livelihoods, and our values.” There are even two holding companies with investments in the emergency medicine staffing business helping drive out working physicians. Sound familiar?

In social work, I’m told by my mother, Dr. Dawn Picone, that at least in New York City, psychologists were pushed out for LCSWs and LCSWs are now being pushed out for BSWs. We often think of ourselves as unique. But knowing that other professions are under the same corporate corner-cutting attack leads me to a conclusion: We are not alone.

Why is this good news for the stenographic legion? It means that the playbook being used by the Speech-to-Text Institute camp and their new pet Stenograph isn’t new. Claim shortage, make the shortage seem much worse than it is, and get customers to accept lower quality under the false premise that there’s nothing else to be done. This a plan copied and pasted from other industries, meaning they don’t have the creativity or intelligence to deal with the massive counter-push of stenographers nationwide. We, on the other hand, emanate creativity. Faced with what we were falsely told was an insurmountable shortage, we took immediate steps to beat it. We created and continue to nurture a bonding, organization, and community that other professions are jealous of. I suspect we are on track to recruit enough court reporters to not only cover every deposition in this country, but also to retake our courts one by one. We truly are guardians of the record, and our guardianship extends well beyond what we’re paid to protect. The digitals are joining us and leaving their corporate masters in the dust. It’s a beautiful thing.

As a musing, I love StarCraft. At the end of the first chapter, the fictional megalomaniac, Arcturus Mengsk, gives one of the best speeches in video game history. I’d like to parody/steal the end of it: “And to all the enemies of stenography, seek not to bar our way, for we shall win through no matter the cost.”

On the issue of video gaming, I’ve reviewed the Readback video starring Bottles the Mole. I’ll be making a fuller post on that sometime within the next seven days, and explain why several things he says are wrong, stupid, or generally shortsighted like Bottles. Until then, enjoy Googling Bottles the Mole.