3 days ago this man performed a 🔥 guitar solo at a deserted strip mall to draw attention to the atrocities committed by an outfit called Western Dental. He got FOUR MILLION views, because even the algorithm believes private equity in health care is bad. twitter.com/ferngalvn/status/1502747249956122624
Western Dental is owned by New Mountain Capital, a "socially responsible" PE firm with $30 billion under mgt founded by a former protege of the late Teddy Forstmann, renowned as the "nicest" & most "ethical" Milken-era corporate raider. A low bar, then & now
Here's how the Western Dental business model works
-reel in lower income parents at daycare/preschool w/ the promise of free care
-tell them kids' teeth are fucked
-fill their little mouths w crowns
-bill Medicaid
A perfect crime, bc the evidence falls out with the baby teeth
Whistleblower suits against another New Mountain pediatric dental chain, Benevis dba Kool Smiles aka Kids Smiles/Pine Dentistry, are filled with stories of kids who needed cleaning but instead got 4-10 baby root canals & stainless steel crowns.
Have you ever tried to so much as *brush* a toddler's teeth? It takes forever & feels like war crime.
But KoolSmiles capped cleanings at 15 mins so they'd have time to meet the minimum quota of 14 SURGERIES PER DENTIST PER DAY.
Their secret weapon: the "papoose board"
Papoose boards terrified kids, who'd piss themselves so often Kool Smiles hygenists all had hairdryers for drying their clothes. Undercover TV news probes ensued.
So Kool Smiles changed its protocol & got into the anesthesia business. What could go wrong, etc.
In 2017, Kool Smiles was simultaneously negotiating both a $300 million sale to New Mountain AND a $24 million DOJ settlement of 5 whistleblower suits when 2-year-old Zion Gastelum walked through the door of one of its Arizona clinics.
Dentists told Zion's mom he needed 3 root canals & crowns for decay caused by...breast milk. But last minute they did 6 root canals 6 crowns & 3 enamelplasties, for which they administered 6 forms of anesthesia, including PROPOPHOL
Clinic was shortstaffed; oxygen malfunctioned..
And everyone was too distracted to notice the baby's heart had stopped.
They were not, however, too preoccupied to bill Medicaid for all the work they had done on the dead toddler's teeth.
Kool Smiles was, incidentally, founded by veterans of the Colorado dental clinic chain Small Smiles, a similar Medicaid kiddie crown assembly line cofounded by a guy whose day job literally consisted of teaching public school systems how to extract more $$ from COKE MACHINE SALES
But it was Western Dental, founded in 1903, that pretty much invented the Kool/Small/KidSmiles business model. Interestingly, by the 1970s Western Dental was calling itself an "HMO."
The history of US healthcare reform is in many ways a story of bad docs performing unnecessary treatments on clueless patients to bilk insurers
HMOs were invented to liberate us frm the ethical minefield by paying docs flat salaries to promote the best outcomes the budget wld buy
The medical establishment hated HMOs & did everything they could to convince us they were a Soviet plot.
And with the exception of Kaiser, HMOs languished until the late 1970s. By which point they had been pretty fully converted into a capitalist plot.
The HMO "revolution" of the 1980s/90s basically begat a virulent new strain of corporate medical middlemen that grasped better than anyone how to recruit/control doctors & game reimbursement systems
Private equity loves a middleman, & started buying in acutecondition.com/p/1990s-continued-physician-roll-ups?s=r
Now there are whole realms of health care like pediatric dentistry, emergency medicine & anesthesiology that have been completely annexed by the legalized embezzlement industry. prospect.org/health/envision-healthcare-hits-the-skids/
moe tkacik
@moetkacik
investigations editor @TheProspect senior fellow @econliberties maureent at prospect.org
