“In 2015, Massachusetts oversight ended with the issuance of a final report from the Massachusetts Attorney General. Less than a year later, Steward began a multi-billion dollar series of deals to sell the real estate of its hospitals to Medical Properties Trust, use the revenue from the sales to expand to more than 30 hospitals nationwide, and extract profit for Steward executives, Cerberus, and Medical Properties Trust.[4]
[4] Rosemary Batt & Eileen Appelbaum, The Role of Public REITs in Financialization and Industry Restructuring, Center for Economic and Policy Research (July 9, 2022), https://www.ineteconomics.org/…
“If you let private equity buy a health care business, you run the risk that profits are going to come before patients. That’s the nature of private equity. And right now, private equity firms are buying health care companies in record numbers. Investments in health care have grown from less than $5 billion in 2000 to more than $120 billion in 2019, according to work done by the Eileen Appelbaum, co-director of the Center for Economic Policy and Research, and Cornell professor Rosemary Batt; private equity owned hospitals now account for approximately one in five for-profit hospitals in the United States.”
