YOUNGSTOWN, Ohio – Just when we thought Steward Health Care System’s victimization of the Mahoning Valley was over, the company’s dark shadow returned to undo the progress made in the past several months.
Insight Health System, which last year acquired several properties from Steward, announced on March 24 the furlough of employees at Hillside Rehabilitation Hospital and the Austintown and Elm Road outpatient centers. This followed layoffs at Insight Hospital & Medical Center Trumbull (formerly Trumbull Memorial Hospital), where operations have been reduced to emergency, laboratory and radiology services.
The facilities aren’t admitting patients, and Insight announced it would furlough an undisclosed number of employees at both locations.
Insight has blamed Steward, claiming it ceased funding for health care services that were delivered at the two hospitals, and was no longer servicing functions called for in the transition agreement.
Steward, which is now in Chapter 11 bankruptcy, sold its management functions to third party operator Golden Sun TSA Services, which is charging even more in fees than Steward had, a claim Golden Sun has denied.
“For our local hospitals, these burdens are untenable and contradict the hospitals’ purpose of providing affordable and accessible medical care to the Warren community,” an Insight news release said.
The furloughs – which Insight expects will last about six months – leave hundreds of doctors, nurses, physical therapists, technicians and others jobless, and the community without key health care resources. Then there is the impact on the local economy, as those wage-earners’ incomes are at best temporarily paused. So far, local officials have done little more than offer regret over the situation, and it may be true there is little they can do. That’s cold comfort to patients who will need to travel to other overwhelmed emergency departments for care, or to the workers – who already have endured months of uncertainty – left trying to figure out their household budgets.
Ultimately, none of these problems matter to the greedy architects of this mess: the Steward executives, including former CEO Ralph de la Torre, who drained the local hospitals of cash. They’re sailing on their yachts, deaf to the cries of the struggling people left in their wake.