Life and Debt at a Private Equity Hospital
A decade ago, a buyout giant took over a group of Catholic medical centers and made some clever financial moves. The pandemic highlights the strategy’s success—and its cost.
St. Elizabeth’s Medical Center.
Photo illustration by 731Early one Sunday morning in May, a mouse wandered onto a high-voltage transformer at St. Elizabeth’s Medical Center in Boston. The rodent died, and so did part of the power supply. In one building, a 1970s beige brick tower, lights went out. Nurses grabbed flashlights to search for medicine. As minutes became hours, staffers rigged up flood lamps, connected to still-functioning outlets by extension cords that snaked through hallways and stuck to the floors with colored tape. Electric beds no longer worked. A nurse gathered a pile of pillows to prop up a stroke victim for a meal.
In a building next door, the lights didn’t go out, but it wasn’t safe to rely on the backup generator alone. Severely ill patients without Covid-19 needed to be moved from a temporary “clean” intensive-care unit into the main ICU, which had no power issues but was packed with Covid cases. So nurses created a makeshift boundary, a privacy curtain on wheels, to keep the two sets of patients apart. “I was beside myself,” says Jackie Fabre, an ICU nurse. “That was unacceptable. That was terrible.”