Yours truly can honestly say that said rube knows a lot about HC & ER in America having designed code that, based on input from docs who know their craft, solves the problem of HC by reuniting billing to services rendered but ... this "wonderful" blurb is not about that but rather about how Wall Street, along with the insurance companies, has screwed over us citizens for years by charging outrageous fees for HC that boggles the mind. Ask any good doc if they like the system. Epithets will be the reply. What's ironic about all of this is the simple fact they make the money for these bastards while treating patients in need. This is NOT RIGHT as seen by words from a powerful Raw Story piece titled Here’s what Wall Street doesn’t want you to know about its grip on emergency rooms.
To whit ...
Doctor Ling Min 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 Ling Min worked for the past 17 years as an emergency room doctor, has outsourced the management and staffing of its emergency room. So, Min 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.
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?
Something is rotten in the state of Denmark - Hamlet
