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“It just seemed like a burnout,” says Rubalcava. Halsen immediately stopped paying vendors they ran out of hospital gowns, printer paper, and surgical supplies almost immediately. Yet it happened much faster than anyone anticipated. Remembers ICU nurse Quiche Rubalcava: “We told them right to their faces how it was going to play out.” Brothman and his two minions, one of whom he’d just hired away from the small private equity firm that had just bankrupted Philadelphia’s Hahnemann Hospital, sat in the front handicapped seats. There would be nowhere for the community to build a new one a million dollars was the going price of an 800-square-foot shack in Watsonville. A couple of nurses gave a presentation on the history of the hospital, and how it would run out of money and be forced to sell off the land to developers to pay its debt. The hospital had always been profitable, employees say, but not profitable enough to cough up $5 million a year in rent.Ī town hall to protest the deal drew a crowd of 450. Then, Brothman would immediately sell the hospital’s underlying real estate to an Alabama real estate investment trust named Medical Properties Trust (MPT), for $55 million, and lease it back for millions of dollars a year in rent and interest payments. First, Halsen would purchase the hospital for $39 million, or $46 million, or $30 million the figure fluctuated depending on who was reporting it. What worried the nurses most was the financing mechanism by which Brothman was proposing to “buy” the Watsonville Community Hospital. It was hard to believe Brothman was allowed to work in a hospital in California, much less own one. Brothman’s last hospital job had involved orchestrating a diabolical whistleblower retaliation campaign against a doctor who’d written an email to other doctors about the hospital’s precarious finances it had later emerged in court that the hospital had paid a strip club bouncer to plant a gun in the doctor’s car and get him arrested in a phony “road rage” incident as a means of “humbling” him. Halsen was a limited liability vehicle incorporated by a guy named Dan Brothman literally the day before the press release went out. No one in the coastal farming town of Watsonville, California, was much impressed when the cash-strapped owner of their struggling hospital, Quorum Health, announced in June 2019 that it was selling them out to something called Halsen Healthcare. This article appears in the June 2023 issue of The American Prospect magazine.