Passing those health check$
So, how not good is USA’s current medical system? Per a very high-ranking doctor in charge of one of our major hospitals:
“It’s become an unrecognizable system. We fight for health while financial professionals are buying it up — and out. Buying out the professionals. Beth Israel? Shutting down. Mt. Sinai losing fortunes. NYC hospitals are going out of business. The medical system has hit financial stress.
“Hiring’s low. Banks are running things. Pre-pandemic Wall Street saw lots of waste. Now administering to America’s aged, infirmed and those in urgent need is private equity.
“Hedge funders — some old-money firms — are buying up MDs. Paying doctors to sell their practices. Sums offered beat what they’d earn with stethoscopes. This city is old and has big numbers of little walk-in curbside clinics.
“Even more than hundreds of them are being bought up. Then re-sold. To Walgreens. Walgreens so far paid out $9 billion. They bought every urologist in one state. All these medical professionals — in their 50s and 60s — retired immediately. They’re now shareholders.
“Young doctors have begun working for Walgreens. NY state is now trying to commoditize health care. Selling it like it’s pork belly. They’re even picking off young medical professionals and leaving behind a vacuum.”
Love stories
A belated thought after finding my trove of Ryan O’Neal interviews.
Once he told me: “My family’s driving me nuts.” So what did he do? “I went and decorated a tree in a haunted house.”
Another time: “We’re always tangling so I won’t visit my son who’s now getting detox.” Then: “But I just fed my dog caviar.”
Hoping to net a few trophies
Ben Affleck directed Amazon Prime’s “Air.” Playing Michael Jordan’s mom Deloris touched something inside Viola Davis.
“I have to air feelings about women of color,” she said. “In the fantasy of every black woman out there, the objective is just to be seen, compensated and embraced for everything they’re worth. You must see this.”
Scene & heard
Factoid: No Three Wise Men in the Florida governor’s mansion this year. They can’t even find one.
Plus: Hospitals won’t do Joe Biden’s annual checkup. They’ll just hold his head up to the light.
Plus: Inquiring que pasa with Mark Kostabi? He’s hosting parties — and hustling art. His guitarist brother Paul plinked till 4 a.m. as a Russian dropped $20K on artwork which hangs on Mark’s every wall. It paid for the wine.
One note about Felicity Huffman who went to jail for her involvement in 2019’s college admissions scandal: She just stated publicly that “I felt I would be a bad mother if I didn’t do it.”
I now know of mothers who are paying “helpers” $60,000 just to assist in getting help to wrangle their kids into Ivy schools. It’s the system. Endemic to today’s lifestyle. Same as our medical profession.
AND not! only in New York, kids, not only in New York.