Health care workers, officials warn: Longer rides will mean more death

People are going to die because of corporate greed.

That was the main takeaway from speakers at a press conference Tuesday afternoon outside Crozer-Chester Medial Center, where health care professionals and elected officials decried the expedited closure of Crozer Health by its for-profit California-based parent company, Prospect Medical Holdings.

“This isn’t a tragedy; this is a crime,” said Tom Polizzi, vice president of Crozer Medical Professionals. “This is failure by design. This is what they want. We have watched, day in and day out, as millionaires in California have chosen to squeeze every cent out of this system, even though they know it costs lives. Every day. They chose it anyway. They continue to choose it. Every day. Make no mistake … many, many more people will die if this is allowed to close, if Prospect is allowed to collapse this system like they want.”

Polizzi was giving voice to sentiments echoed by many on the strip of grass near Crozer’s sign and, judging from the applause he received, supported by many others who had gathered to express outrage, concern, alarm and fear for what Monday’s motion would mean to the tens of thousands of people who rely on Crozer for health care and what closing the doors at CCMC and Taylor Hospital in Ridley Park would mean for the county.

“People are going to die on the way to the hospital,” warned Bill McCall, chief shop steward of the Crozer Chester Paramedics Association.

McCall said three things went through his head when he got word yesterday that Crozer would be closing: “Time is muscle”; “time is brain”; and “golden hour”.

They relate to heart attacks, strokes and trauma, all of which will no longer be treated at Crozer.

Emergency Room Dr. Max Cooper said a person had come in just this morning with a major heart attack who was rushed to the cardiac catheterization lab.

“As he arrived, his heart stopped, but because he was in our cath lab, and because he had a cardiologist next to him, they opened his blood vessel and they restarted his heart, and he’s alive right now in our ICU because this hospital is here and this hospital is open,” Cooper said. “If he had to drive 15 minutes down the road to Riddle, or 30 minutes down the road to Penn, or across state lines to Christiana, he would have died in the ambulance and they would not have been able to resuscitate him when he got to the ER. In our fight to save lives, seconds matter.”

“The loss of Crozer, the loss of Crozer EMS would go beyond hospital walls,” said McCall’s stepdaughter, Rachel McCollough, also an EMT at Crozer. “It would affect the entire county, even areas where there aren’t Crozer buildings. It would break relationships with towns, cities, boroughs; it would break relationships with schools, fire departments, police departments, businesses and the communities that hold them. It would throw the entire county and neighboring areas into a major crisis. It would risk lives by adding to the already major EMS shortage that we face. To close would be a betrayal, not only to the employees and their families, but to the entire county.”

“Our patients are going to die and that’s fact,” said Melanie McKendry, a lead assistant/patient advocate who works in an oncology setting. “Them closing us is going to disrupt chemotherapy. We have patients who are actively getting treatment that are being abruptly told that they have to find care elsewhere, in 10 days.”

McKendry teared up and her voice broke as she gave a scenario in which a stage-three cancer patient was introduced to their oncologist, scheduled for surgery and was so happy to finally have a treatment plan, only to be told two days before pre-admission testing that they have to find somewhere else to go.

A co-worker said she actually had to make that call Tuesday morning.

“Is that fair? Does anybody think that’s fair? We have had patients call us nonstop, distraught, begging and asking us where we’re going, and we don’t have an answer,” McKendry said. “It’s not just about the chemo treatment, it’s about prior authorizations, going to different locations and having to have your chemo re-authorized. That’s going to be a lull in care and death will happen.”

‘Avoidable tragedy’

County Council Vice Chair Richard Womack urged those present to continue fighting, saying this is not over yet, while state Sen. Tim Kearney, D-26, Swarthmore, said this is not about dollars and cents, but about people’s lives.

Delaware County District Attorney Jack Stollsteimer said the closure was not just a tragedy for residents, but a literal death sentence for people suffering traumatic injuries and for whom the staff at Crozer were saviors.

“And make no mistake, this was an avoidable tragedy brought on by corporate greed and individuals who care nothing for our communities,” he added.

Folcroft Deputy Police Chief and Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 27 President Chris Eiserman echoed those sentiments in a statement that pointed out the closure of CCMC means the closure of the region’s only burn, trauma and crisis center, along with more than half of all ambulance services in the county.

“These closings are a direct threat to the health and welfare of hundreds of thousands of people,” he said, and demanded that local officials step up to make sure a plan is in place.

‘A tragic lesson’

Maureen May, president of the Pennsylvania Association of Staff Nurses and Allied Professionals, said the current crisis was imposed upon Crozer by Prospect under a system that places the dollar above all else, including patients’ and employees’ lives.

“This is a tragic lesson,” she said. “This is one that’s being played throughout the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and throughout the country. We have laws that do not allow this to be criminal activity, and that’s why Prospect is getting away with it. We need to make sure that this egregious dismantling of the Crozer system never happens again and that Prospect Holdings somehow are accountable for the death and destruction that will happen in this community. Where is their liability?”

Crozer Behavioral Health nurse Peggy Malone, president of the Crozer Chester Nurses Association, who emceed Tuesday’s event, said administration has offered nothing except, “We’re closing,” and “Get the patients out as fast as we can.”

Malone said Prospect has accomplished exactly what it set out to do when it came into the county nine years ago and purchased the Crozer Health system.

“They came to take every penny from our system, from us, from this community,” she said. “They embezzled it all, they stole it all, and now they’re going to go and they leave us with all of this destruction behind us.”

Matt Cahill, a former phlebotomist at Crozer and retired Army medic who has numerous family members that still work for the health system, planted an upside-down American flag shortly before the press conference signaling “distress.”

Cahill said he had undergone more than five surgeries at Crozer associated with his deployments and that he had been misdiagnosed at another hospital in New Jersey following a car accident. They missed a ruptured spleen and lacerated liver, he said.

“I came here and they took care of me way better than that other hospital, so Crozer has always been my standard that I applied to other medical areas that I’ve worked in or seen, especially with the military overseas,” he said. “It’s keeping up the standards even over there and we’ve never had a complaint or any problems, treating with medicine in the military and all like that, because of what I’ve learned here.”

‘Where do they go?’

Malone said Prospect is very proud of the fact that they are finding beds for everyone at other facilities and sending them home. But, she asked, where are they supposed to go after the crisis center and emergency room are gone?

“University of Penn is not close. Riddle is not close. Christiana Care is not close, for any of us and for any of these patients,” she said. “Where do they go? They die. Who’s going to tell the mom whose child died of an asthma attack that her child died because she couldn’t get care close enough to be able to save her child? What do we tell our trauma victim’s parents when they could have been saved … that their children died because we couldn’t get them somewhere quick enough?”

Nobody cares, she said, because it doesn’t have anything to do with money, it only has to do with people. Prospect would rather pull the rug out from under almost 3,000 employees and untold scores of patients than continue to work with the public servants who have desperately been scrambling to keep the system open, Malone said.

Among those who would have died but for the existence of Crozer is Chester Councilwoman Elizabeth Williams, who had to be rushed to the CCMC emergency room in 2015.

“They got me here in time,” she said. “But what if the person can’t get here in time? I made it, because I got here in five minutes, from Trainer to Chester, and it saved my life.”

State Rep. Leanne Krueger, D-161, Wallingford was joined by fellow legislators Carol Kazeem, D-159, Chester, and Gina Curry, D-164, Upper Darby.

‘Blew up everything’

Krueger said U.S. Judge Stacey G.C. Jernigan of the Northern District of Texas Bankruptcy Court has alluded to some clawbacks of the tens of millions of dollars that the state and county has put into Prospect over the last decade or so to keep the system running, much of that coming in the last few months.

That could be a question for Attorney General Dave Sunday, who legislators are also urging to pursue criminal charges against some of those at Prospect responsible for bringing the company to a financial cliff side.

Krueger added that while numerous deals to sell off the system had been attempted, Prospect purposely tanked them so that it could divest itself of any liability through the bankruptcy system and leave the wreckage of Crozer in its wake.

“Prospect has blown up every deal by wanting to push their liability onto somebody else,” she said. “They have been unreasonable. They have never negotiated in (good) faith. Prospect blew up everything.”

Krueger said fellow state Rep. Lisa Borowski, D-168, Radnor, has crafted legislation that would ban private equity in health care and the kind of “leaseback” deals Prospect had saddled Crozer with on its own buildings here.

That should come up for a vote soon, she said, but Krueger and fellow legislators were calling on Jernigan to deny Prospect’s motion for an expedited closure schedule. This would give the county more time to work out and implement a plan to shore up the gaps in coverage that would be left by Crozer’s closing, she said.

But that didn’t happen late Tuesday as the judge supported the expedited closure.