Debra Russell was working a shift at the Glenwood Regional Medical Center in West Monroe, Louisiana, when a relatively young patient began having a heart attack. When an emergency room physician read his EKG and attempted to call a cardiologist, the cardiologist refused to have the conversation; the hospital hadn’t paid him in months. So the doctor ordered a vial of the emergency anti-clot agent TNKase and asked Russell to administer it immediately, which is when she learned that Cardinal Health had also cut the hospital off for not paying its bills, so there wouldn’t be any TNKase either.
Glenwood’s parent company, Steward Health Care, had spent most of the year to supply its Texas and Louisiana hospitals with generalist doctors and nurse practitioners like Russell. In its desperation to keep the clinicians showing up, Steward execs constantly claimed to have sent payments they had not actually sent, at one point even emailing the staffing agency copies of fake checks they claimed to have mailed. “The last couple of weeks that I was there at Glenwood, I would pray every morning, ‘Lord give me a sign to stay or to get out of this,’” Russell recalled last spring at a of the Louisiana House of Representatives.
One morning, she saw the community coffee service man, who had been restocking the cafeteria for 30 years, repossessing all the pots and urns, and she knew it was time. She worked her final shift last November, just a week or two before a team of inspectors .