When Health Becomes a Commodity: How Private Equity Endangers Our Communities
Protecting our hospital, our rights, and our future from Wall Street medicine
In communities across America, a troubling pattern is unfolding. Hospitals that once stood as pillars of public health are quietly being turned into profit centers for private equity firms. Services are cut, staff are driven away, and patients are left to navigate a broken system designed not for healing, but for extraction. Now, this national crisis has arrived at our doorstep.
Bay Area Hospital (BAH), a critical institution serving patients from Florence to Crescent City, is considering a sale to Quorum Health, a private equity-backed firm with a track record that should alarm every resident. Quorum does not "invest" in hospitals in the way their glossy brochures suggest. Instead, it takes out loans against a hospital's assets, saddling the institution with debt while siphoning cash to investors. It is a model built on financial engineering, not healthcare delivery.
Dr. Charles Hurbis, a respected local physician, recently sounded the alarm in a powerful open letter. He detailed how the current management at BAH has already presided over the loss of critical services: urology, cardiology, oncology, and now interventional radiology. These aren't luxuries; they are lifelines. Their departure represents not just a financial loss, but a degradation of care that forces patients to travel hours for basic treatments.
Rather than addressing these failures, the administration proposes to sell our hospital to a firm whose business model relies on accelerating exactly this kind of decline. It is a familiar story. Private equity firms like Quorum strip hospitals for parts: eliminating "unprofitable" services like maternity wards and cancer care, outsourcing labs and pharmacies, and eventually pushing facilities into bankruptcy when the debts they engineered come due. Between 2010 and 2022, nearly 20% of rural hospitals sold to private equity firms closed altogether, according to national studies.
The alternative to this grim future already exists. Local physicians and healthcare leaders have crafted a collaborative plan to keep BAH solvent without sacrificing services or community control. Modeled on successful efforts elsewhere, this plan envisions a network of healthcare institutions that share workloads, maximize revenue from in-house specialties, and reinvest in local health rather than Wall Street profits. It was presented to the hospital board twice, only to be dismissed without serious consideration.
Located in Coos County, Oregon, where I make my home, the area has already seen this playbook before. Weyerhaeuser Company operated a profitable paper mill here, employing 1,200 people, until its board opted for a new business model, closing down the mill and leaving a huge workforce jobless. The needs of the community were sacrificed on the altar of corporate profit, just as they threaten to be again with BAH.
BAH has every advantage necessary to succeed: geographic necessity, a growing population base thanks to housing developments and the coming deep-water port, and a community willing to invest in its own future. A recent poll shows that 54% of residents would even support a levy to stabilize the hospital's finances if necessary. As one citizen put it bluntly at a board meeting, "I may not be a rich man, but I would support a levy to save our hospital. Without it, I'd have to leave the area."
What is at stake is more than just a building. It is the health, safety, and economic vitality of our entire region. Allowing Quorum to take control would mean handing over our community's future to absentee investors with no stake in whether we thrive or suffer. Fighting for a locally controlled, community-centered healthcare system means fighting for the right to care for ourselves, our families, and our neighbors.
This fight is not unique to Coos County. It is a microcosm of a national struggle against the commodification of basic human needs. It also strikes at the heart of a deeper principle: the right of communities to govern themselves to higher standards than distant corporations or even federal regulations may require. Empowering communities is not without challenges. It must be balanced with a steadfast commitment to protect fundamental rights and prevent local abuses. But when done thoughtfully, community self-governance offers a path forward that is tailored, responsive, and rooted in real-world needs.
A one-size-fits-all system, whether imposed by Washington or Wall Street, fails to account for the distinct realities of different places. Bay Area Hospital’s needs are not interchangeable with those of an urban hospital in New York or a suburban clinic in Dallas. Our solutions must reflect who we are.
The battle for BAH is, at its core, a battle for community rights: the right to local stewardship of essential services, the right to prioritize health over profits, and the right to design a future that serves people, not balance sheets. If we lose that right here, it will only become harder to reclaim elsewhere.
Local control. Local investment. Local care. Community rights. Anything less is a betrayal of the community we call home.
Photo - Bay Area Hospital website
Union County Hospital, where I work, was bought by Quorum in about 2019. The plan was specifically to do this: strip it of it's assets, then shut it down and leave farthest Southern Illinois without a hospital that would accept Illinois Medicaid.
Then COVID happened, and the federal and state government pumped a lot of money into Critical Access Hospitals, but with the stipulation that they could NOT shut down. Quorum was stuck trying to actually run their little asset-factory hospitals like hospitals!
After a couple of years of that (Spoiler alert: Quorum is not actually in the healthcare business, and was horrified to find itself obligated to provide healthcare services to the small communities where it's Golden Geese were located) it literally GAVE AWAY the small hospitals it had acquired in the Midsouth area: Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, and Tennessee. Every month they had to provide actual healthcare to actual patients cost them money.
Now we're owned by another conglomerate, nominally in the business of healthcare, but mostly in the business of making money by streamlining services, overordering billable testing, and using algorithmically derived treatment models that treat patients like inconvenient ATMs.
Our greatest asset once was that we're your neighbors in the community. We see our patients everyday at the grocery store, at school events, in church. We care about you: you're our neighbor, our family, our friend. We're still here, still your neighbor, but now we feel a profound sense of moral crisis. None of us went into our careers to provide profit-driven care that would strip our community of it's wealth for the benefit of our faceless Corporate Overlords. at the expense of our friends and families.
‘Commodification of basic human needs’- this phrase gets at the heart of so many problematic issues in America, where we see profit as the driver of so many decisions. It has always struck me that the Constitutional phrase ‘the pursuit of happiness’ can lead to all kinds of trouble. When ‘happiness’ is equated with wealth, money or power, the green light is on for individual or corporate greed. Instead of enshrining the values of community and common interests, America has made the individual pursuit of happiness its highest goal. This we have a country run by billionaires, whose pursuit of happiness outweighs the common good.
Other countries have found ways towards a more moderate system - balancing life and liberty of individual rights with the rights of the community. Thinking of Canada, and many European countries that have free medical care as ‘a basic human right’, which Bernie Sanders repeats over and over again to huge crowds.