By Peter H. Lewis and Barbara Durr | December 9, 2020 For a hospital system organized as a not-for-profit charity, Mission Health made a lot of profits. The money left over after Asheville-based Mission subtracted its expenses from its revenue — what would be called profit at a for-profit hospital — grew year after year, right up to 2018, when Mission’s directors surprised nearly everyone by announcing plans to sell out to Tennessee-based HCA Healthcare, the nation’s biggest chain of for-profit hospitals. Mission at the time was as strong financially as it had ever been, which Mission’s executives said…
Posts published in “Healthcare”
By Peter H. Lewis | May 13, 2020 Originally published by AVL Watchdog in Asheville, N.C. The biggest health crisis in a lifetime hit Asheville shortly after the one-year anniversary of the biggest upheaval in local healthcare: the $1.5 billion sale of the nonprofit Mission Health System to HCA Healthcare, the nation’s largest for-profit hospital management chain. The transition from local nonprofit to profit-hungry behemoth has not gone smoothly, and not just because of the coronavirus. Now, as Mission Health begins to reopen for elective surgeries and procedures put on hold during the first wave of the ongoing pandemic,…
I handed the pharmacist my American prescription for Humalog insulin. “Szia,” I said in my best Google Hungarian, “töltse ki ezt a receptet?” She looked at the paper, and said in English, “Sure, but we have to order it. Is tomorrow okay?” I asked how much it would cost. “Let’s see,” she said, tapping the keyboard. Then, almost apologetically, “Ten milliliters is . . . 6,543 Hungarian forins. About 20 euros.” My phone’s calculator made the conversion to dollars: $22 and change for a two-inch vial of Eli Lilly and Company’s fast-acting Humalog insulin lispro, purchased in a random…