What Wall Street Doesnt Want You to Know About Hospital Emergency Rooms
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- Published on Tuesday, 07 April 2020 01:50
- Written by editor
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A Socialist Project e-bulletin ... No. 2047 ... April 7, 2020
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What Wall Street Doesn’t Want You to Know About Hospital Emergency Rooms
Eileen Appelbaum and Rosemary Batt
Doctor Ming Lin is the first emergency room doctor to be fired for going public with his concerns about poor hospital emergency room safety practices and shortages of medical supplies and protective gear for health workers. He won’t be the last.
Like many hospitals in the US, PeaceHealth St. Joseph Medical Center in Bellingham Washington, where Ming Lin worked for the past 17 years as an emergency room doctor, has outsourced the management and staffing of its emergency room. So, Lin works on-site at the hospital’s ER, but he is employed by a physician staffing firm that runs the ER. These staffing firms are often behind the surprise medical bills for ER services that patients receive after their insurance company has paid the hospital and doctors, but not the excessive out-of-network charges billed by these outside staffing firms.
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.
