Something ominous in going on in the health care industry. Even as some health care CEOs have become the highest compensated chief executives in the country, a lot of companies are undergoing layoffs. Arcadia Resources, in particular, went from rapid expansion to fast collapse in just a couple of years. Here is the Indianapolis Business Journal with the details:
A major lender to Arcadia Resources Inc. has moved to foreclose on the struggling Indianapolis-based business, which in turn agreed to cease operations.I have been predicting here on TDS that the health care industry is yet another financial bubble that will implode in the coming years. Perhaps we are right now seeing the first signs of that collapse.
Arcadia reported the foreclosure agreement with Dallas-based Comerica Bank, which Arcadia owed $11 million, in a Thursday filing to the Securities and Exchange Commission.
The closing represents the probable final fall for the once-promising health care company. Just two years ago, in May 2010, the company announced a huge expansion that it expected would add 930 jobs in Indiana by 2013.
But, according to the company’s last annual report, filed in June 2011, Arcadia administrative staff had fallen slightly in the previous year, to 229. Its field staff, most of whom are not in Indiana, had remained steady.
To help pare down debt, Arcadia completed the sale of its DailyMed pharmacy business in February to a subsidiary of Illinois-based Walgreen Co. But the $2 million in proceeds from the sale went entirely to satisfy a debt to one of DailyMed’s suppliers.
if efficiency/productivity remain job #1 - then you are exactly right...
ReplyDeletePeople who see this coming collapse are taking steps now to learn the skills and gain the knowledge necessary to stay healthy, and to effectively treat common ailments. Also, patient/physician cooperatives like this one in Portland are good ways to address affordability and access issues:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.ppcpdxcoop.org/
Three years ago, I signed up for their DailyMed program after receiving a brochure about it in a mailing from my health insurance company. Each shipment of meds were screwed up (I still have a half-dozen as-needed asthma inhalers stashed away, because they couldn't understand my request to stop filling that particular prescription), the customer service people were all borderline retarded, and I spent even more time dealing with this "convenient" service than I did with my normal pharmacy just down the road. The biggest irony, and the last straw, was that my doctor, his main nurse, and the insurance company itself claimed not to have ever heard of DailyMed. (Of course, stupid old Thom went with the mail-order pharmacy because it sounded cool, and so I am a big part of the problem, but still.) Good riddance to Arcadia.
ReplyDeleteHey Bill, you're right: all your posts (which connect the dots from many local stories very well nationally) about layoffs at healthcare organizations point to the conclusion that healthcare isn't one of the few bastions of dependable employment left anymore. Another stat that points to that fact (which has been reported on more widely, although moreso in the "progressive" side of the media) is that the pharmaceuticals sector isn't growing as fast as it one was either.
ReplyDeleteOf course, the primary reason is obvious: ordinary, middle-class citizens -- if they're lucky enough to be working and earning a dependable income they can at least live on -- are pinching their pennies, and can't afford to spend as much on medicines and doctors ... because their increasingly lousy healthcare plans won't cover half as much as they did 20 or 30 years ago. And for the self-employed, unemployed and no-longer-looking-but-not-old-enough-for-Medicare crowd, medical expenses are an even dearer luxury, assumed only when absolutely, direly necessary.
This article is missing HUGE chunks of facts. The home care division is just fine and operational under new ownership.
ReplyDeleteIrresposible journalism at its finest.