A retired Crozer nurse unleashed her anger at Prospect Medical in a letter to the bankruptcy judge
Mary Ellen DeAngelo worked at Crozer for 44 years before retiring in 2018. She wanted the judge to understand what was lost when Crozer closed.
When Mary Ellen DeAngelo received a postcard last month sent to former Crozer Heath patients about its bankruptcy, she didn’t toss it into recycling like she usually does with mass mailers.
After all, DeAngelo, 72, was more just than a patient of Delaware County’s largest health system, which closed in the spring, shuttered by its California-based, for-profit owner of eight years.
DeAngelo had worked there as a nurse for 44 years before retiring in 2018.
After noticing that the card showed the address for the judge overseeing its owners’ bankruptcy, DeAngelo thought, “You know what, I’m just going to tell her what they did, what they destroyed, the beautiful place they destroyed,” she said in an interview.
The result was a four-page, handwritten letter posted last week on the bankruptcy docket for Prospect Medical Holdings. In the letter, DeAngelo shared her nostalgia for the Crozer of old and her scathing view of the last owners of the former nonprofit health system.
“There are no words to describe how upset I am about this situation. I appeal to you to hold these people accountable in any way you can. How this happens in our country makes me ashamed. Greed is going to kill us all,” she wrote to the judge in Dallas.
A resident of Gloucester County in South Jersey, DeAngelo described how she had worked in medical documentation, going over doctors’ notes on patients to catch missed diagnoses. This resulted in more revenue from insurers.
“We were told by our bosses that the work we did put supplies in the hands of clinicians so I worked so hard,” she wrote. “Now I know it was to line the owners’ pockets.”
The year DeAngelo retired, Prospect’s majority owner at the time, private equity firm Leonard Green & Partners, paid investors a $457 million dividend.
To repay its debt from the dividend, Leonard Green and Prospect sold the real estate at Crozer and other hospitals in Connecticut and California to a real estate investment firm, saddling the hospitals with big rent payments.
Delaware County and DeAngelo’s former colleagues are now paying the price. When Prospect closed Crozer-Chester Medical Center in Upland and Taylor Hospital in Ridley Park, 2,651 people lost their jobs, according to a regulatory notice. County officials are scrambling to replace services.
Prospect did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
» READ MORE: Here’s Delaware County’s plan for addressing emergency response shortages following Crozer’s closure
DeAngelo said she could not be sure that the judge read her letter, but she told The Inquirer that writing it helped her to process her own feelings about Crozer’s last owners.
“In a world that seems just so uncaring and callous, I want her to know a simple person’s observation of what they did.”