Providence executives recently announced they will enter a joint venture to outsource their home health, hospice and community palliative care programs to Compassus, a private equity owned Tennessee-based company with no footprint in the Pacific Northwest.
By outsourcing their homecare programs to private equity, Providence is selling out their patients and employees and once again proving they care more about their own bottom line than the communities they are supposed to serve.
move will potentially leave underserved populations in Oregon without critical support. It may be financially profitable for Providence and , but it is morally bankrupt.
Study after study confirms: when private equity takes over, patients can expect higher-costs and lower-quality healthcare. A 2023 report from the Center for Economic and Policy Research found that “a focus on profit maximization leads, on average, to fewer visits to hospice patients, inappropriate use of lower-skilled staff to care for patients, and recruitment of patients who are ineligible for hospice care and thus lose access to curative or emergency care. Unleashing incentives for profit maximization have not led to better outcomes for patients and families but rather, in many cases, quite the opposite.”
Providence has already demonstrated a disregard for its most vulnerable patients by systematically eliminating specialty programs like the Alternative and Augmentative Communication program which literally gives people who cannot speak a voice.
The Oregon Nurses Associations calls on state regulators to act on behalf of Providence patients and employees and stop this deal from moving forward.
