The phrase “hack and slash” falls woefully short of adequately describing the mindless, shortsighted decisions Prime makes on a regular basis.
The best way to describe how Prime Healthcare operates is to picture a sleazy contractor that wants to flip a house. He has no morals and no conscience to stand in his way, so he decides to buy the most beat up house he can find to minimize his out of pocket investment and maximize his profits. He looks at lots of terrible houses and finally picks out “the cream of the crap” which are loaded with catastrophic issues including cracked foundations, termites, and mold problems. These train wrecks are available at rock bottom prices since they’re the ones nobody else wants. So what does our contractor do next? He slaps on a fresh coat of paint, invests the bare minimum to make the house look slightly less like a disaster, and does his best to unload this hot potato on the first sucker that he comes across. A month later, when the shoddy work he did to give the illusion that the house was no longer falling apart is discovered, he’s thousands of miles away and laughing all the way to the bank with loads of money.
That’s what Prime does, all across the nation, right under our noses. They buy the failing hospitals nobody else wants, invest the minimum amount possible to give the false impression that the major issues have been fixed, and then do their damndest to sell the steaming pile and run before it all unravels.
If the Prime Circus is headed to a town near you, RUN! Not just because working for them is positively soul crushing either... because competing with the hundreds or even thousands of displaced workers that will be dumped into your job market overnight when their hospital inevitably closes will make it that much more challenging to find your next job.
