For-profit hospitals arrived in Pennsylvania in 1998. Tenet Healthcare, based in Dallas, owned a hundred and twenty hospitals in eighteen states, and that November the company bought Hahnemann out of bankruptcy, along with St. Christopher’s
and six other area hospitals. “We promise we will be here for the long haul,” Michael Focht, Tenet’s C.O.O., said at a ceremony held at Hahnemann. “This is not a short-term visit.”
Eight years later, Tenet agreed to pay nearly nine hundred million dollars in fines to the Justice Department for excessive Medicare billing, distributing kickbacks to doctors, and exaggerating the severity of diagnoses in order to inflate charges. Mike Halter, who served as C.E.O. of Hahnemann under Tenet for two decades, told me that Tenet was forced to cut costs, which it did in part by ignoring requests to replace old equipment. Health care “is a very capital-intensive business,” he said. “Equipment has a useful life of five or six years. Facilities need to be upgraded every eight or ten.” A piece of stucco broke loose from the building and damaged a car. In reviews online, patients lamented conditions in the hospital. In December, 2013, a pregnant woman who went for an ultrasound complained of being kept in a cold room with flickering lights. In 2017, a patient reported finding “blood and shit on the floor.” Yet the hospital remained busy. “A lot of patients just didn’t have a choice,” Kevin D’Mello, an internist, said. “This is where they had to go.”
Freedman founded his first investment company with several young investment bankers about thirty years ago, when he was in his twenties. “We had a mentor who taught us how to turn around distressed businesses and acquire companies,” he told me. “For the better part of seventeen years, that was my core business, restructuring insolvent companies.”
By the end of 2011, Freedman and some partners had taken over four struggling hospitals in L.A., where a majority of the patients were Black or Hispanic, uninsured or covered by Medicare or Medicaid, and often afflicted with chronic illnesses. Many of those patients used the emergency room as their primary source of care, and Freedman’s group focussed on making the E.R. more efficient: hiring doctors with expertise in medical coding, in order to maximize reimbursement; pursuing insurers for unpaid invoices; reducing the time patients spent in the E.R. Soon, all four hospitals were solvent.
In 2014, with Paladin, Freedman signed on to manage Howard University Hospital, in Washington, D.C., which that year reported a fifty-eight-million-dollar loss. Paladin cut salaries, benefits, and operating expenses, and two years later the hospital showed an operating surplus of more than twenty million dollars. “We were incredibly successful,” Freedman said. “I’d become passionate about turnarounds in these communities.”
Hahnemann staffers said that Freedman seemed to see reviving struggling hospitals as a reflection of his benevolence. He communicated a mixture of good intentions, sanctimony, and unabashed self-regard. He assured one physician that he and his wife, Stella, were people of deep religious faith. At other times, he boasted about his real estate. In addition to the Philadelphia town house, he owned a home in Hermosa Beach, with views of the Pacific. He was a member of an advisory council at Harvard Medical School, and sat on the board of a health-policy center at the University of Southern California. In 2016, Freedman had received a lifetime-achievement award from a prominent nonprofit for his contributions to reducing racial health-care disparities. “He wanted to look like the hero,” a former senior Hahnemann doctor told me.
Freedman seemed convinced that he was uniquely well suited to sort out Hahnemann’s problems, but there were differences between Hahnemann and the other hospitals he’d helped lead. “He talked a lot about the things that made him successful at Howard,” Jill Tillman, a health-care executive at Drexel College of Medicine, told me. But, unlike Howard, Hahnemann had long been under for-profit management. Tenet, as one of the world’s largest buyers of hospital equipment, enjoys deep discounts and generally excels at controlling costs. “If Tenet couldn’t get any more juice out of it, there was no more juice left to get,” Tillman said.
Freedman also said that he had a plan to address the financial challenges of treating publicly insured patients. Medicare and Medicaid, which account for more than sixty per cent of all U.S. hospital care, often pay less than the cost of treatment: according to an analysis by the American Hospital Association, in 2018 Medicare and Medicaid underpaid the cost of care by a combined $76.6 billion. In an early meeting with Halter, the Hahnemann C.E.O., Freedman explained that, at his other hospitals, he had profited from federal Disproportionate Share Hospital programs, which reward hospitals that serve large numbers of publicly insured patients. “What Joel did not know is that there are caps on Disproportionate Share payments in the state of Pennsylvania,” Halter said. He explained to Freedman that Hahnemann was already at its cap. “He told me, ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about,’ ” Halter said. Only after meeting with the governor’s office and the state Department of Human Services did Freedman accept that Hahnemann would not receive additional payment from these programs.
In April, 2018, Halter retired. In the next eighteen months, Hahnemann and St. Christopher’s went through half a dozen chief-executive and financial officers, most of them dismissed by Freedman with little explanation. Freedman hired battalions of consultants, who specialized in health care, technology, and management. “I would walk down the hall and half or two-thirds of the people I would not recognize,” George Amrom, a former surgeon and long-serving chief medical officer, recalled. “They were all consultants.” Few of them lasted long. “Joel has a twenty-week relationship with people,” a former Hahnemann executive said. “The first eight, you’re a ‘rock star.’ In the middle, you don’t hear from him. The last eight weeks, it’s ‘You’re a nice guy, but I need a rock star.’ ”
Senior physicians and administrators found it hard to plan for the future. Stein, the surgery chair, had been told that his department would be prioritized. He drew up detailed plans for improvement, some of which required no capital investment, and sent copies to each successive Hahnemann C.E.O. But none of them were in place long enough to act. Logio had a similar experience. “I had the same conversation with every single C.E.O.,” she said. “And as soon as the C.E.O. got fired I would have to start over.”
A majority of the hospital’s patients came through the E.R., and Freedman believed that improving the flow of patients, and more precisely documenting the severity of their conditions for insurers, would allow Hahnemann to vastly increase revenue. One day, medical staff arrived at the E.R. to find that the procedures for patient check-in and ordering tests had been altered. Edward Ramoska, who had been a Hahnemann E.R. doctor since 2006, said, “It could potentially have worked for a community hospital”—one with no medical residency. But Hahnemann was a teaching hospital, with one of the largest residencies in the nation. Forty-five residents worked in the E.R. alone. Before an attending physician saw a patient, a resident generally took a medical history and conducted a physical exam. In the new E.R., patients were shuttled between a holding area and examination rooms, often undressing more than once. In addition to exasperating doctors and patients, the arrangement slowed the department’s operations. “They didn’t understand how an academic emergency room works,” Ramoska said, of American Academic Health System.
A physical renovation of the E.R., intended to make things more efficient, was botched. A new door frame was too narrow for wheelchairs. Walls went up on either side of a service window. A space intended for patient examinations was built without a sink, forcing doctors to run elsewhere to wash their hands. In Pennsylvania, alterations to health-care facilities require approval from the Department of Health, which the hospital’s management had neglected to get. Construction stopped and did not resume.
To increase reimbursements, A.A.H.S. hired a team of nurse-consultants to monitor how doctors documented diagnoses. Virtually all U.S. hospitals try to maximize payments from insurance companies, but the new approach struck some Hahnemann doctors as intrusive, if not unethical. The nurse-consultants sometimes second-guessed the diagnoses of residents. “They were thinking about the bottom line, and we were just thinking about the patient,” Christy Johnson, a former resident, said.
Since 2008, American hospitals have been involved in more than a thousand mergers and acquisitions, resulting in large, powerful health systems with influence on the price of hospital care and the reimbursement rates paid by private insurers. These conglomerates generally make up the losses incurred treating poor patients by building referral networks that attract privately insured patients seeking specialized care.
In Philadelphia, Tenet drew few referrals. As the Jefferson and Penn health systems cultivated satellite hospitals, physician practices, and urgent-care centers, including those in wealthy suburbs on the Main Line and in South Jersey, Tenet closed or sold most of its local holdings. Some of Hahnemann’s best-known specialists left for other hospitals. After a group of cardiologists departed, the hospital’s heart-transplant program closed.
If there was an area where Freedman’s ostensible skill set met Hahnemann’s needs, it was the negotiation of partnerships to draw referrals. “He went out and met with various leaders at different facilities,” the former Hahnemann executive recalled. “At one point, there was going to be a relationship with organization X. Next, it would be organization Y. There were always a lot of deals in flux, none of which came to fruition.”
Freedman did not appear to grasp the economics of tertiary care, the specialty practices that generate costly procedures. “He did not understand that if you do away with tertiary care no one’s going to come downtown to Hahnemann,” Amrom, the former chief medical officer, said. “I remember trying to explain to him that one of our largest areas was nephrology. And if you did away with transplant you’re going to destroy nephrology.”