Prospect Medical, which mostly serves low-income patients, has suffered a litany of problems: broken elevators, dirty surgical gear, bedbugs and more. Its owners, including Leonard Green & Partners and Prospect’s CEO, have cashed in.
This story was originally published by Lookout content partner, ProPublica.
On Sept. 30, we published an article examining how Prospect Medical Holdings, a hospital chain, and Leonard Green & Partners, its private equity owner, had extracted hundreds of millions of dollars in profits for investors while patients served by their hospitals suffered from a litany of problems.
The article reported that on 14 occasions over a decade, government health inspectors had concluded that Prospect hospitals posed an “immediate jeopardy” to patients, defined by the federal government as problems that have caused, or are likely to cause, “serious injury, harm, impairment or death.” Other pervasive problems included everything from bedbugs and ceiling leaks in hospital buildings, to unpaid gas bills for company ambulances to shortages of medical supplies.