QUACK

No one in the coastal farming town of Watsonville, California, was much impressed when the cash-strapped owner of their struggling hospital, Quorum Health, announced in June 2019 that it was selling them out to something called Halsen Healthcare.

Halsen was a limited liability vehicle incorporated by a guy named Dan Brothman literally the day before the press release went out. Brothman’s last hospital job had involved orchestrating a diabolical whistleblower retaliation campaign against a doctor who’d written an email to other doctors about the hospital’s precarious finances; it had later emerged in court that the hospital had paid a strip club bouncer to plant a gun in the doctor’s car and get him arrested in a phony “road rage” incident as a means of “humbling” him. It was hard to believe Brothman was allowed to work in a hospital in California, much less own one.

What worried the nurses most was the financing mechanism by which Brothman was proposing to “buy” the Watsonville Community Hospital. First, Halsen would purchase the hospital for $39 million, or $46 million, or $30 million; the figure fluctuated depending on who was reporting it. Then , Brothman would immediately sell the hospital’s underlying real estate to an Alabama real estate investment trust named Medical Properties Trust (MPT), for $55 million, and lease it back for millions of dollars a year in rent and interest