The Private Equity Firms That Gobble Up Hospitals and Spit Them Out

If anyone had asked him, which they hadn’t, Jones would have told them that this man needed to go to a different hospital, one that was only five miles away and that has a comprehensive stroke center. There, the man could have seen a neurologist and gotten the procedure to bust the clot in his brain. But the policy was to accept all transfers, no matter what. And technically, Jones’s hospital had a neurology service: They had exactly one neurologist, but he did not come in on nights or weekends.

And that was how Jones found himself face-to-face with this man, realizing that in the richest country in the world, armed with all the medical knowledge he had spent so much time amassing, and with all the desire in the world to help, he could not treat this man’s stroke. In fact, he couldn’t even give him a room, because the emergency department was full. The patient was lying on a gurney in a hallway. “He just sat and sat. We controlled his blood pressure because that’s important in a stroke. And he basically received no appropriate treatment for a stroke.”

Jones has not followed up with the man. But he’s haunted by the thought that, all these years later, this man probably still has difficulty speaking, still has a droop in his face, probably walks with a cane or walker. And it’s also his best guess that if this man had been able to get a thrombectomy, that all those symptoms would have resolved and he could have resumed his normal life.

“He’s going to be disabled for the rest of his life. And the reason it happened was because of this protocol system they put in place. And it’s my name: ‘Accepted and transferred by Dr. Jonathan Jones,’” he said. “I mean, you go home and cry.”