laprogressive | About a third of hospital emergency rooms are staffed by doctors on
the payrolls of two physician staffing companies—TeamHealth and Envision
Health—owned by Wall Street investment firms. Envision Healthcare
employs 69,000 healthcare workers nationwide while TeamHealth employs
20,000. Private equity firm Blackstone Group owns TeamHealth, Kravis
Kohlberg Roberts (KKR) owns Envision.
Care of the sick is not the
mission of these companies; their mission is to make outsized profits
for the private equity firms and its investors. Overcharging patients
and insurance companies for providing urgent and desperately needed
emergency medical care is bad enough. But it is unconscionable to muzzle
doctors who speak out to advocate for the health of their patients and
co-workers during the global pandemic that is rapidly spreading across
the US.
Yet, that is what Blackstone-owned TeamHealth just did. Why would an
experienced ER doctor be fired in the middle of a pandemic? One clue may
be that Blackstone’s CEO, Stephen A. Schwarzman, is part of President
Trump’s inner circle.
He may not want to risk that relationship by allowing TeamHealth’s
doctors to inform the public about Washington’s mishandling of the
allocation of supplies and protective gear. The President might conclude
that TeamHealth doctors didn’t appreciate him enough, and where would
that leave Schwartzman?
PeaceHealth St. Joseph Medical Center may
have the distinction of being the first hospital to have a doctor
outsourced from a physician staffing firm unceremoniously fired for
telling the public the truth. But it won’t be the last. Hospitals are
now telling doctors treating coronavirus patients they will be fired if they speak to the press.
