I was in the mood for reading more about bats, so when this news story popped up in my news feed, of course I had to read it: Scenes From the Bat Cave. What else would you expect but a nice bit of natural history? It wasn’t. It’s about crappy greedy capitalistic humans in Florida.
The Rockledge Regional Medical Center reeks of raw sewage and bat guano. No one knew that bat shit was called “guano,” or that the pungent smell emanating from the fifth-floor intensive care unit had bat guano as a source, until last spring, when a delirious patient complained he was being attacked by a “giant grasshopper,” which turned out to be a bat, which turned out to be one of what four nurses told the Prospect was estimated to be at least five thousand more.
The exterminators alleged in court that Steward Health, Rockledge’s corporate owner, never paid them the $936,320 they were owed for “evicting” the bats from the hospital, which sits roughly eight miles southwest of the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. And so when, a week or two before Christmas, the sinks on the second floor began backing up with thick, black gunk that smelled like feces of the human sort, the hospital’s in-house maintenance staff tried to handle the job themselves.
That’s the last we hear of the bats, and instead it’s all about the corrupt management of Steward Health, which apparently bought up a bunch of hospitals only to neglect them. They were in the business of scraping every penny of profit out of these places, and actually maintaining them would have meant less money for their corrupt corporate overlords, who had yachts to maintain instead.
In Massachusetts, where Steward was founded and owns nine hospitals, the company’s representatives have essentially ghosted the political class it wooed so effectively a decade ago, when de la Torre graced the cover of the Boston Globe Magazine and touted himself as the quintessential Obamacare success story. Over the past few weeks, Massachusetts politicians have railed against Steward, de la Torre, and his yachts, and Gov. Maura Healey last week instructed the company to leave the state “as soon as possible.”
They are leaving Massachusetts and moving to Florida, which has a more charitable climate for parasites and exploiters. Their hospitals there are a horror story — health care is ridiculously expensive, but do you think anyone is getting their money’s worth out of these toxic facilities?
Nurses provided the Prospect with dozens of photos and videos documenting maintenance problems at the hospital: water leaking out into the parking lot from one of the maintenance rooms, a giant oxygen tank sitting in the loading dock one nurse worries is “one drunk driver away from blowing the back wing of the hospital away,” the fourth floor “graveyard of broken beds” with unfulfilled work orders dating back to September, and sink after sink filled with black gunk, sealed off with “DO NOT USE” signs and months-old work orders. On the paper covering one of the sinks alleged on the work order to have a “terrible smell,” an employee had scrawled, “Fix me NOW!” and two others had playfully responded, “I’ve only been broke 2+ months! What’s the hurry?” and “NOT BEYOND STATUTE OF LIMITATIONS YET!”
Five of the building’s nine elevators have been nonoperational for the better part of the year, and only one or two of the working ones can properly accommodate a critical care patient. Paradoxically, this was an even bigger safety issue back before the bats were discovered, when patients who experienced complications during heart surgery needed to be shuttled up three stories to the ICU; now they can be raced down the hall to the relocated ICU, where half the sinks still have “Do Not Use” signs hanging over them.
Imagine how awful these places would be if they were in Canada rather than Florida. Somebody would be complaining about having to wait for service. Sewage filled sinks and bats fluttering about the ICU is a small price to pay for allowing rampant capitalism to flourish.
I’d rather read about bats than about selfish, greedy humans, I’m afraid.
