Crozer was not an island, and what happened to them affects all the nearby health systems. In the fourth installment of this special series, we break down how one community’s loss becomes a neighboring community’s nightmare, lay out the ‘private equity playbook’, and explore how the financialization of medicine is everywhere - in every state - and how it affects us all.

This is bigger than Crozer. Just ask anyone from a neighboring hospital dealing with the fallout, or who is in another hospital similarly bought and bankrupted. Follow up this Thursday for more.

When health systems are underwater, you might want to look up upstream to see what the trouble is. When you get there, sometimes you’ll find out why those systems are falling into the water. . . and sometimes you’ll find out who’s pushing them. In this episode, we’re going upstream to look at how we got to the point where a health system that served more than a hundred thousand people per year suddenly closed its doors, and what went wrong along the way.

A health system is gone. How did they end up underwater . . . and who pushed them in? Follow up this Thursday to find out.

The story of private equity in healthcare is often told in numbers, spreadsheets and transcripts from bankruptcy court. But in Part 2 of our series, we hear from the people in the trenches and on the front lines of Crozer Health, a collapsed hospital system in Pennsylvania, who are living out the awful consequences of decisions made, not by clinicians in Delaware County, but by executives in California and a judge in Texas.

You need to hear this while it's fresh and raw. We'll have more on Thursday but, for now, here's what we heard late last week.

The Crozer Chester Medical Center in PA is closing as we speak, but the fall of Delaware County's largest hospital system has been building for years. In interviews with the doctors, nurses, paramedics, and legislators who kept Delaware County healthy, Wendy and Matt go behind the headlines and speak to the people who are living through these changes right now.

This is the first episode in a multi-part series focusing specifically on Crozer Health.

New episodes drop each week.

We're never more aware of the need for real human interaction than when faced with an automated Patient Portal. In this special bonus ep., Wendy and Matt share a listener voice memo about the challenges of navigating patient care through AI, and talk about how we can - and must - do better.