![]() Experts assured that the hospital closure epidemic was a natural phenomenon driven by demographic shifts and the stinginess of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.Įarlier this year, though, DOJ’s Kresse unexpectedly sued Alecto and various of its owners and affiliates on behalf of the United States government, in a little-noticed complaint that matter-of-factly stated its allegation: fraud. These kinds of hospital hit-and-runs have become so frequent in recent years you’d think they’d been victims of some kind of TikTok challenge, but with few exceptions the raiders have mostly emerged from the rubble unscathed, as small communities became too preoccupied by attempting to salvage their hospitals to bother examining where the money had gone. (Nevertheless, Alecto’s hospitals received at least $49 million in CARES Act funds intended for the health care sector, according to coronavirus stimulus records, much of it after the hospitals in question had shut down and laid off all their employees.) It failed to forward the $550 monthly child support payments of at least one employee to his child’s mother, and skipped out on more than $1.4 million in taxes it owed in Texas, $821,000 in water and sewer charges and other fees it owed the city of Wheeling, West Virginia, and hundreds of thousands more in taxes and levies owed in Martins Ferry, Ohio.īy the end of 2020, four of Alecto’s five hospitals had either shut down or announced imminent plans to do so the final one was recently sold to former colleagues of Alecto’s owners. ![]() Hospital employees complained of regularly operating without basic sedatives, syringes, IV bags, and even toilet paper, and one ultrasound technician in Ohio poignantly told The New York Times in 2020 he had charged $63 onto his personal credit card to buy ultrasound film on eBay because “I hated having to tell I can’t give you a picture today.” Alecto stopped making payments on employees’ health insurance premiums in 2019, even though it continued deducting the cost of those premiums from their paychecks, and was accused by many staffers of “raiding their 401(k) plans,” according to a physician who worked in its Texas hospital. Wherever the money landed, Alecto didn’t pay the bills. What the attorney, 20-year agency veteran John Kresse, found was hardly surprising: Instead of paying the government as promised, the hospital’s owner, Alecto Healthcare Services, had spent hundreds of millions of dollars buying four other hospitals and funneling money through various limited-liability vehicles that were supposed to be discrete entities but in reality operated as one big commingled family.
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