Healthcare

HCA

Last edited by lenazun on November 25, 2009 - 8:19pm
Company Snapshot: 

The Hospital Corporation of America (HCA, formerly Columbia/HCA) is the largest for-profit hospital chain in the United States, owning some 169 hospitals and 100 freestanding (ambulatory) surgery centers in 20 states and six hospitals in the UK. In 2006 a group of investors took the company private in a $30 billion leveraged buyout, at the time the largest in U.S. history.

Number of employees worldwide: 
161,000
Chief executive officer: 
Jack O. Bovender, Jr.
Website: 
HCA
Global Fortune 500 rank: 
308
Tel: 
615-344-9551
Total revenue: 
25,477.00
Corporate accountability
Labor: 

HCA owns its own temp agency, from which it outsources union jobs. Union activists say HCA has increasingly relied on community volunteers to perform tasks that were once done by union employees.

Political influence (national and international): 

When asked in 2004 whether America could afford universal health care, Senator Bill Frist (R-TN), brother and son of the founders of HCA responded that universal coverage was "impossible." (NYTimes 2/7/04).

A year later Frist sold his HCA stock before its price plummeted, a move that precipitated an SEC investigation. Frist claimed the the stock was in a "totally blind" trust, but Washington Post reporters revealed that trustees of the "blind" trust had contacted Frist over a dozen times about his HCA holdings before he sold them. (Jeffrey H. Birnbaum, "Letters Show Frist Notified Of Stocks in 'Blind' Trusts Documents Contradict Comments on Holdings," WPost, October 24, 2005; Page A01).

To learn more about how former Senator Frist's career helped HCA, see Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW).

After retiring in early 2007, Frist announced that he would lead a drive by the charity Save the Children to make the preventable deaths of millions of children in the developing world an issue for Americans.

Social responsibility: 

Although charges are common that HCA cares more about its bottom line than the health of its patients and obligation to serve the communities where its hospitals get public subsidies, the criticism can sting the most when it comes from HCA's own employees. In August 1997, the New York Times reported more than a dozen people filed secret whistleblower lawsuits against the company, contending that the company engaged in various schemes to defraud national health care programs like Medicare.

Around the same time, stories began to surface in the press. For example, Mark Gardner, a former Columbia/HCA hospital manager, told ABC's 20/20, "this company is a ruthless, greedy company -- period," and that while he was with the hospital conglomerate, "I committed felonies every day." (See "10 Worst Companies of 1997," Multinational Monitor, 12/07).

Gardner told 20/20 about a homeless man who was brought to the hospital by paramedics. After the hospital found out he had no insurance, "he was given a glass of juice and dismissed, discharged." The man left the emergency room, walked about 30 feet, fell down on the hospital lawn and died.

Health Care Fraud

HCA Inc. executives Jay A. Jarrell (former chief executive officer of HCA's southwest Florida division) and Robert W. Whiteside (former director of reimbursement) were convicted in July 1999 on six fraud counts each related to almost $3 million in reimbursements. On 2002, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit in Atlanta reversed the convictions. According to the New York Times (3/25/02), "the three-judge panel said the federal government failed to prove Mr. Jarrell and Mr. Whiteside had knowingly and willfully made false statements in reports to Medicare." HCA also paid $840 million in fines and penalties to settle related criminal charges and most civil allegations against the company.

The original trial focused on annual reports submitted to Medicare by HCA's Fawcett Memorial Hospital in Port Charlotte, Fla. The government said the executives defrauded Medicare of almost $3 million by inflating the amount of interest expense reimbursed by the government health-insurance program for the elderly and disabled.

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History

Dr. Thomas Frist, Sr. and a group of physicians built Park View Hospital in Nashville, TN in the 1960s. By1968, Dr. Frist, Jack C. Massey and Dr. Thomas Frist, Jr. formed their own hospital management company --­ Hospital Corporation of America -- aka HCA. The company went public in 1969. In 2006, it was taken private by a group of investors.

Financial information
Stock ticker symbol: 
N/A
Fiscal year: 
2007
Fiscal year: 
2007
Link to annual report: 
Annual Reports web page
Sources
Watchdogs and related campaigns: 
Taxpayers Against Fraud
National Nurses Organizing Committee (CNA)
Service Employees International Union (SEIU)
Physicians for a National Healh Program
Healthcare Now
Related reading: 
License to Steal by Malcom K. Sparrow
"Sicko" facts (Michael Moore)
Healthcare Now's reading list