6 May—Sigmund Freud was born 168 years ago, the Hindenburg blew up 87 years ago, Vladimir Putrid declared Volodymyr Zelenskyy a wanted criminal (an honor that Zelenskyy must appreciate) yesterday, and Texas-based Steward Health Care, a privately held just-for-profit hospital conglomerate with, among other troubled facilities, nine hospitals in Massachusetts, this morning announced it would be filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

Brings to mind California-based just-for-profit Prospect Medical Holdings, whose three hospitals in Connecticut were to be but may no longer be bought by nonprofit Yale New Haven Health. Of course, Prospect hasn’t (yet) threatened (or promised) to fiddle any sort of bankruptcy protection or reorganization. But the scumbags who run Prospect are really no different from the scumbags who run Steward, so who knows?

Prospect has a disgraceful rap sheet that includes voluminous unpaid bills in, among other states, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Pennsylvania, while executives and shareholders have been pocketing hundreds of millions of dollars.

Meanwhile, Steward, which takes (took?) pride in being America’s largest physician-owned private hospital operator, for at least a few years has shown itself to be in serious financial distress—or at least that its assets have been milked by its greedy executives and shareholders. Closed hospitals and missed payments to vendors and its landlord are among the symptoms.

It seems that, just like Prospect (and probably other for-profit hospital operators), Steward sold its real estate to Medical Properties Trust with the pretext of using the proceeds to improve patient care. While some of the cash may have been used for that purpose, lots—perhaps most—of it went elsewhere.

There’s nothing at all wrong with any aspect of profit-based health-care. The nonprofit model isn’t much better, for starters, and the government model is largely a sick joke. And given human nature, profit alone drives most advancement in science and improvement in care these days.

Problem is, Prospect Medical Holdings and Steward Health Care have been wrong from the start . . .