Communication is crucial to the success of any organization, and especially so for health care organizations at all levels. I could not help noticing as a patient that communications had almost completely broken down since Sun Capital Partners decided to “sponsor” Miami Beach Medical Group, a set of primary and specialty health care clinics renamed Clinical Care Medical Centers. A failure to communicate endangers the health and lives of patients. Things have really gone south with the installation of a Call Center, a formidable barrier to communication staffed by sincere and eager but lowly paid employees from all over the world.
First of all, I thought I had gotten ahold of one of those call centers India and Pakistan is famous for although it is located in Miami and run by a Sun Capital Partners' manager. I was astonished by the immediate breach of normal security protocol. Instead of asking me for my address and phone number after I gave my name, I was given the information and asked to verify it. The Call Center manager was not available, so I asked the Call Center employee to have the manager correct that amateurish procedure. That has apparently not been done. All you have to have is a person's name and birth year to gain access to his or her information and perhaps confidential information on medical records. They do match the caller number to their patient records, so hackers may use burner phones.
In any case, it is nearly impossible to contact anyone or to have them get back to you. Complaints are rife on the Web, but apparently no longer responded to. The manager of the center and the highly credentialed executives of the company are unavailable. Your email might be blocked if you complain to a Sun Capital Partners executive. I have had to walk over to the South Beach center just to get my own schedule straightened out. A patient patient could die waiting for what Sun Capital calls Value Based and Accountable Health Care.
The Gauge Fund out of Texas flipped the bevy of medical centers to Sun Capital Partners, a Boca Raton company whose offshore investors allegedly enjoyed phenomenal gains under the “Rising Sun” and expect even better taking advantage of Medicare Advantage. Sun Capital Partners advertises that it realized $1.41 billion in gross proceeds in 2021 with $972.5 million of capital invested. Public relations media reports that the value invested in the Miami Beach medical centers is over $500 million, a figure said to be 10 times earnings. We are to believe these numbers and other representations because the key values of the venture capital fund are “honesty” and “transparency” and “accountability.” That is why we must ignore the terrible things said about the firm and its founders and directors who do not respond to us, why we cannot examine the books, and why we cannot know who the investors are, although the organization endeavors to make huge gains on public health insurance. We are to leave transparency up to an unreachable elite.
Sun Capital Partners has a checkered record. The top wolf is Marc J. Leder, best known for his lavish and dissolute lifestyle. The black squares represent the usual vulture and hedging activities: leveraged buyouts, sale leaseback schemes, large dividend payouts prior to bankruptcy, pension defaults, multiple offshore entities, and so on. Sun reputedly invested in businesses it had no experience in and managed them with its pawns. The vulture's objective was to borrow and extract as much money as possible and leave the companies ruined or bankrupt, rewarding wealth instead of work, leaving workers stiffed for millions in pensions, then, in some instances, buying the companies cheap out of bankruptcy.
The Americans for Financial Reform Education Fund coalition issued a report entitled 'Sun Capital: A Case Study in Private Equity Looting,' summarizing the firm's “Track Record of Greed.” The International Brotherhood of Teamsters, in its September 2011, 'From Toxic Assets to Toxic Releases, Preliminary Report, said “Sun Capital Partners investment strategies destroy economic value, undermine worker safety and destabilize communities.” Their approach was apparently to use high leverage, cut costs to unsustainable levels, disregard worker and community welfare, cut pay and benefits, employ lower-skilled workers, create and fail to disclose high liabilities to investors.
On the other hand, the white squares represent successful growth and expansion followed by quick flips for amazing returns. My own interest in the positive was piqued by the negative experience I had waiting hours and hours on the second floor Sun Capital Partners' South Beach medical center until I gave up and walked out in pain. I became even more frustrated and wary when I heard about Sun's reputation for exploiting distressed companies. Yet Matthew Garff, Managing Partner of Sun Capital Partners, claims the cultural foundation and “core” of his company despite its bad squares is “Radical Honesty.” He does not want us to focus on “the negative perception of the industry,” but rather on the wealth it creates with the great human resources Sun Capital Partners itself enjoys and installs in its portfolio of companies.
So let us be honest and confess that our race would not progress without radical honesty about its evils. The motives for complaints are ideals of what should be. Our positive progress depends on negative complaints, the very complaints misguided executives would rather not hear, that they would rather muffle with his array of boilerplate business hype. That culture impedes progress, and, in this health care industry, is a disease that should be rooted out.
For all we know, Sun Capital Partners and its infamous party boy may have reformed themselves in part because of the vilifications heaped on them, therefore we may have reason to hope for the continuous improvement they like to advertise.
Finally, I confess that I am prejudiced. I like Cubans, and I happen to know that socialist Cuba once had one of the best health care systems in the world, and they were not about to let unregulated private capitalists get their hands on it. Now the culture at my South Beach medical center is Cuban American; I have been a patient there for years. The clientele and staff are primarily Cuban including some brand new arrivals. I am the only one I know of who does not speak Spanish although I get the gist of many things said. I have become sympathetic to that culture.
Someone finally called me from the medical center with a translation into English about a mix up in prescriptions I had called the Call Center about several days prior. Timely communication of the correct information is vital to the function of any organization. The absence of it can kill.
Fix the Call Center!
I have found that one way to cut through the call center is to send an email through the website, if that's possible. They usually respond positively within a day or two.
Ron