![]() ![]() ![]() “There’s no shortage of options,” Allan Baumgarten, a financial health policy analyst in Minnesota says. Forest Park’s San Antonio hospital is closed and employees there have filed a class action lawsuit.įor patients, though, this is not a huge deal. The Frisco, Fort Worth and Southlake hospitals have either filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy or defaulted on loans. Today, the Dallas hospital is closed, and some employees say they haven’t received pay in months. “Also, the people involved were physicians and it didn’t seem like they had that business person to guide them.” “So it was a lot of things coming together at once,” Goodman says. Not-for-profit systems like Baylor and Parkland don’t have to. On top of that, the ACA has a penalty for physician-owned hospitals, and requires for-profits like Forest Park to pay taxes. As insurers tried to keep premiums down by limiting those out-of-network visits, less money was coming in. See, the hospitals relied on money from out-of-network payments. Goodman says the main reasons that campus closed in November were the Affordable Care Act and mismanagement. Ultimately, naysayers didn’t sabotage the Dallas hospital. KERA reached out to Forest Park Medical Center but didn’t get a response. “A lot of the competition hated Forest Park, they were viewed as excessive, and people questioned their motives.” To put it simply, Forest Park Medical Center in Dallas was like a gold-plated house of Popsicle sticks.įirst, critics tried to blow the structure down… “The way they kind of differed,” Goodman says, “was they started these companies around it that would handle the real estate, that would manage the facilities, a capital investment firm that would try and generate money to pay for this stuff and keep it going and they were ultra-luxury.” Goodman says the business model was complicated. Forest Park Medical Center opened five hospitals in Texas in just six years. What was new? The fierce rate of expansion. The doctor-owned hospital idea wasn’t new in 2009. “So these guys said hey, we can get the guys to invest in it, we can get the money, and as long as it’s operating they can get returns and they’ll also have this beautiful, big hospital to practice in,” says Goodman, who’s been covering the rise and fall of Forest Park Medical Center for D Magazine’s D Healthcare Daily. ![]() Doctors who were tired of being treated as employees. The idea for Forest Park Medical Center, reporter Matt Goodman says, was to appeal to doctors who wanted more control at the hospitals they worked at. The Dallas campus has closed, and the others have either filed for bankruptcy or defaulted on loans. And they were - from the hand cut stone and sculptures to the lavish trees and fancy menu.ĭespite the extravagant decorations, the basic business model just didn’t work. The Forest Park Medical Center campuses were supposed to be more like spas than hospitals. ![]()
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