Washington, DC – U.S. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) today issued the following statement on Prospect Medical Holdings, which owns Our Lady of Fatima Hospital and Roger Williams Medical Center, filing for bankruptcy:
“Bad outcomes for patients and providers are par for the course when private equity firms take over hospitals. On the Budget Committee, we investigated what happens when private equity companies and health care operators like Prospect take over facilities and bleed them dry, and the end result is almost always harmful both to patients and to hardworking hospital staff. The positive news for Rhode Islanders is that the conversion process for local Prospect-owned hospitals was already well under way, and disruption to the state’s health care system can be minimized. But as we make decisions about our health care system moving forward, we need to be very clear that the priorities for a hospital must be its patients and workers – not greedy private equity investors.”
During Whitehouse’s tenure as Chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, he led an investigation into how certain private equity firms and their hospital operators, including Prospect Medical Holdings, are draining the health care system. The Committee’s findings, which were released last week, detailed how private equity’s ownership of hospitals earned investors millions while patients suffered and hospitals experienced health and safety violations, understaffing, reduced quality of patient care, and closures.
