Bad Crow Review: Pirate Equity Kills
Keel-haul the killers and thieves
Links are at the end.
PATIENTS FOR PROFIT: HOW PRIVATE EQUITY HIJACKED HEALTH CARE
Kaiser Health News has been publishing articles about pirate equity’s predatory consumption of health care businesses all year. The latest starts with a sucker punch.1
Two-year-old Zion Gastelum died just days after dentists performed root canals and put crowns on six baby teeth at a clinic affiliated with a private equity firm.
His parents sued the Kool Smiles dental clinic in Yuma, Arizona, and its private equity investor, FFL Partners. They argued the procedures were done needlessly, in keeping with a corporate strategy to maximize profits by overtreating kids from lower-income families enrolled in Medicaid. Zion died after being diagnosed with “brain damage caused by a lack of oxygen,” according to the lawsuit.
Kool Smiles “overtreats, underperforms and overbills,” the family alleged in the suit, which was settled last year under confidential terms. FFL Partners and Kool Smiles had no comment but denied liability in court filings.
A reminder: KHN is not affiliated with managed care giant and notorious overbilling skinflint Kaiser Permanente.
Settlements like the one described above serve both parties: families get their money more quickly than they would going to court and waiting through likely delays and an almost certain appeal, and the pirate equity company avoids the publicity of a trial and a definitive guilty verdict, with all that that entails for the bottom line. In the end, though, the businesses and perhaps their insurers are down some money, and the family is down a child.
Complementing lawsuits like this are massive fines paid to the federal government as a result of overbilling by PE-owned practices.
KHN found that companies owned or managed by private equity firms have agreed to pay fines of more than $500 million since 2014 to settle at least 34 lawsuits filed under the False Claims Act, a federal law that punishes false billing submissions to the federal government with fines. Most of the time, the private equity owners have avoided liability.
They’ve made penalties for fraud and killing or injuring patients a cost of doing business.
The story also notes that PE-owned specialty practices such as anesthesiology and emergency room staffing are often the culprit behind out-of-network and surprise billing charges.
We don’t need to remind you how to permanently scuttle out-of-network and surprise billing, but we will anyway: Medicare for All, with its single, universal, nationwide network.
Read the whole story. Researchers have identified locales where pirate equity dominates the medical landscape, and where they’re involved in health care provision cradle-to-grave, including hospice providers and funeral homes. And the piece provides links to all the other pirate equity-related work KHN have done this year.
72,000 people paid at least $6.7 million for Covid-19 consultations promoted by America’s Frontline Doctors and vaccine conspiracist Simone Gold
About a year ago The Intercept broke a story detailing the fabulous amounts of money being made by Covid disinformation group America’s Frontline Doctors in conjunction with other scammers.2
The Intercept has obtained hundreds of thousands of records from two companies, CadenceHealth.us and Ravkoo, revealing just how the lucrative operation works. America’s Frontline Doctors, or AFLDS, has been spreading highly politicized misinformation about Covid-19 since the summer of 2020 and refers its many followers to its telemedicine partner SpeakWithAnMD.com, which uses Cadence Health as a platform. People who sign up then pay $90 for a phone consultation with “AFLDS-trained physicians” who prescribe treatments such as hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin to prevent and treat Covid-19. The drugs are delivered by Ravkoo, a service that works with local pharmacies to ship drugs to patients’ doors. Of course, that’s if patients ever get the consultation; many customers told Time they never received the call after paying.
The data from the Cadence Health and Ravkoo sites was provided to The Intercept by an anonymous hacker who said the sites were “hilariously easy” to hack, despite promises of patient privacy.
That was September 2021. On November 14 of this year, the Daily Beast reported that AFLDS is in meltdown in part because its founder, Simone Gold, who did a two-month bit for her efforts on Insurrection Day, has been spending $65,000/month on personal expenses for herself and her boyfriend while living in a luxury home purchased by the organization.3
For months, AFLDS has been split between its board and Gold, the group’s charismatic founder and convicted Capitol rioter, over an internal audit into Gold’s personal spending. That dispute spilled into the open on Nov. 5, when the board sued Gold to try and force her to stop representing the organization, in a lawsuit first reported by Vice News. Now the lawsuit’s outcome could determine the fate of the group driving much of the medical disinformation on the pro-Trump right.
AFLDS is tearing itself apart in a fight over what Gold’s rivals describe as her extravagant spending using the group’s funds. The alleged purchases include $100,000 on a single private jet trip and $50,000 a month in Gold’s personal expenses. Much of the controversy has centered on AFLDS’s purchase of a $3.6 million mansion in Naples, Florida., where Gold lives with her boyfriend: a much younger underwear model and fellow Capitol rioter.
What’s the point of being a leading source of medical disinformation if you can’t spend $50 grand/month on yourself and a measly $15 grand/month on your boyfriend? May as well just be a regular doctor.
Alex Chilton sings Volare on “High Priest.” Not for us to say for sure whether or not, but it’s possible you haven’t lived until you hear Alex Chilton sing Volare. Les Rallizes Dénudés is a scantily-recorded Japanese band with a mythic reputation, heard here on “The Oz Tapes.”4 Charlie Megira & the Modern Dance Club pack 31 tunes into 54 minutes on “Love Police,” including one called The Return of the Russian Frogmen That Died and Came Back to Life As Strange Looking Radioactive Creatures.
That, comrades, is all we got. Get well, take care, be well.
Thank you, Weldon. These are strange times.
It's not just the scammers disrupting appropriate Covid medical care. It's also the conspiracy theory advocates persuading the gullible that vaccines are a hoax and ivermectin type "treatments" are effective.