19 December—State Senator Saud Anwar is a physician “currently serving as the Chairman of the Department of Internal Medicine for Rockville General Hospital, Manchester Memorial Hospital and Eastern Connecticut Health Network,” according to the ECHN website. ECHN is one of the endangered properties of the infamous and reprehensible Prospect Medical Holdings chain of for-profit (formerly non-profit) medical facilities. Prospect’s other holding in Connecticut is Waterbury Hospital, a.k.a. Waterbury HEALTH. (Presumably HEALTH is an acronym for something, but it escapes us. So let’s go with Hospital Experiencing Assorted Losses and Terrible Harm.)

So you’ve got to give Dr. Anwar some real credit for proclaiming in the Sunday Republican, “The private equity (firm) [presumably PMH] is trying to make money while putting the quality and well-being of the citizens of our state in danger. That is why we need to do everything in our power to get them out of here and not let them be part of any health care in our state.”

Dr. Anwar knows that Prospect Medical Holdings is a private equity firm and he also must know that private equity firms are notorious for buying businesses, including non-profits, stripping them of assets, and letting them decline and die. The only people who benefit from the harm inflicted by private equity firms are the senior executives and investors, many of whom are unprincipled venture capitalists. We’ve seen that clearly with Prospect’s selling off Waterbury Hospital’s real estate in order to reward its executives and investors with cash.

Dr. Anwar, savvy realist that he is (as well as a likely victim of Prospect’s vile financial practices), acknowledges that Prospect Medical Holdings is in the business to make money. But, sad to say, that’s what medicine has become today: the health business. Prospect Medical Holdings may be a particularly disgraceful and disturbing example of the blatant, shameless capitalization of health and well-being, but it’s not atypical.

Whether for-profit or not-for-profit, private or public, institutions and practitioners that once treated patients now deal with customers, barely more than entries on ledgers and spreadsheets. It used to be about health and well-being. Now it’s about paperwork and profit.

Money, money, money. Nothing is free. But, like it or not, that’s just capitalism in action . . .