In March, I came down with a life-threatening case of COVID-19. I spent 16 nights in the hospital, including a week in the intensive care unit. I underwent an emergency intubation, followed by six days on a ventilator. I received services from multiple specialists—experts in critical care, pulmonology, anesthesiology, infectious disease—and a bevy of experimental medications, including the now-infamous hydroxychloroquine.
Imagine how absurd it would be to patronize a grocery store that didn’t post any prices. Yet that’s what millions of Americans do when they use health care.
HCA Healthcare is one of the world’s wealthiest hospital chains. It earned more than $7 billion in profits over the past two years. It is worth $36 billion. It paid its chief executive $26 million in 2019. But as the coronavirus swept the country, employees at HCA repeatedly complained that the company was not providing adequate protective gear to nurses, medical technicians and cleaning staff.
Alaska hospitals have been crucial to the state’s economy, driving employment even as other industries have gone up and down. But they’re among the businesses that have seen steep drops in revenue during the COVID-19 pandemic. And while federal aid has been crucial, it hasn’t made up for their losses.
St. Louis-based health care system Mercy is dissolving its in-house investment team to hand over the vast majority of its portfolio — more than $2 billion — to a little-known wealth manager with deep ties to Mercy’s board chair, according to three informed sources.
AdventHealth and Orlando Health, the two largest hospital chains in Central Florida, lost a combined $837.3 million in the first quarter of 2020, with the losses so far coming from losing money in the stock market. Quarterly financial statements for bondholders reviewed by WMFE reveal a glimpse of how the COVID-19 pandemic impacted AdventHealth and Orlando Health. The key metric to watch is net income on operations – this is the profit hospitals make on day-to-day operations.