Attorney General Harris: Stop the Daughters of Charity Sale

“If you don’t have insurance, you need to get out of here.”

That’s not something you’d ever want to hear from your hospital, but according to legal testimony, it's what Prem Reddy, CEO of Prime Healthcare, said to the former chief emergency room nurse at Desert Valley Hospital.

And now Prime healthcare wants to buy the Daughters of Charity hospital system where I work--six hospitals with over a hundred years of service to California’s neediest patients.

Daughters of Charity hospitals have operated in low-income communities as a safety-net healthcare service, with the stated mission of serving the sick and the poor, regardless of their ability to pay. Meanwhile, Prime Healthcare has admitted to being under investigation for allegedly overfilling Medicare, and they have a track record of ignoring community needs, eliminating health services, and laying off dedicated caregivers in order to maximize profits.

Luckily, we still have a chance to stop this sale in its tracks.

California Attorney General Kamala Harris, who has fought on behalf of low-income and vulnerable communities, has to approve the sale. If we can show her how a sale of Daughters’ hospitals to Prime would hurt these hospitals’ mission of service to the poor, we can convince her to stop the sale!

We know that Prime is the wrong buyer for these hospitals. They are wrong for the patients, wrong for the communities, and wrong for the healthcare workers like me who have given our lives to service. Twenty-nine state legislators, 14 community organizations, and four county supervisors across California have already urged Harris to block the sale to Prime Healthcare. Now we need to add our voices.