4 May—Taking a brief hiatus (and needed respite) from the Gaza micro-intifada lawlessness on and around university campuses, we turn to the local news that broke yesterday: Yale New Haven Health has backed out of its agreement to buy Prospect Medical Holdings’ assets in Connecticut. Sadly, it’s not at all surprising.

If your memory needs refreshment on the Prospect-Yale debacle, which bodes even more disastrously for the communities served by the affected hospitals than when they were sold to for-profit Prospect Medical Holdings a few years ago, just click on Healthcare business a sick joke, 11 February 2022; Disgraceful Prospect isn’t alone, 19 December 2023; Big bad health business, 20 December 2023.

Prospect Medical Holdings certainly has been guilty in greedily and cavalierly filling the coffers of its executives and shareholders at the expense of virtually everyone else: patient care has suffered catastrophically through no fault of hospital staff; employees, contractors, and suppliers have essentially been stiffed; communities have been left hanging.

So Prospect Medical Holdings, corporately and severally, is irredeemable, unrepentant scum. No two ways about it.

But Yale New Haven Health must have known all about Prospect’s disgraceful business model, unsavory reputation, and questionable assets in Connecticut before making an offer or even considering one. Well, it should have, anyway. In the circumstance, however, it certainly would appear that Yale didn’t perform any due diligence at all and jumped into the deal with blinders, head first, and hit the muddy bottom.

It certainly wouldn’t have taken much deep digging for Yale to turn up the lousy fiscal and physical condition of Prospect’s abused and deteriorating medical holdings. Not including the real estate, of course, which Prospect had sold off and was just leasing back. Virtually everybody in and around Waterbury knew precisely what was going on, for instance.

But not Yale? Were its accountants, investigators, and inspectors blind or just asleep at the wheel?

So what’s the future of the hospitals in Waterbury, Manchester, and Rockville? They’re not likely to close. But how will they be saved?