In April 2024, medical staff testified before Louisiana’s House Health and Welfare Committee about just how bad things had gotten at the Glenwood Regional Medical Center.

The West Monroe hospital had been under fire from the state Health Department over lapses in patient care that seemed to be escalating. The hospital had stopped paying bills for oxygen supplies, the blood bank, and repairs to the elevators that take patients up to surgery.

Former Glenwood nurse Debra Russell testified that there wasn’t a cardiologist available when a man suffered a heart attack or a $5 piece of equipment she needed for a routine procedure.

“You would send a nurse to go get it,” Russell said. “And she would come back and say, ‘Oh, Miss Debra, I don’t have any.’ I said, ‘Go to another unit.’...‘We don’t have one.’”

Glenwood was run by Steward Health Care, at the time one of the country’s largest for-profit health care operators. But its building was owned by Medical Properties Trust—a real estate company based in Birmingham, Alabama, that charged Glenwood monthly rent.

State Rep. Michael Echols, a Republican whose district includes Glenwood, had been flooded with concerns from community members. Echols had begun to wonder whether the high rent to MPT was fueling Glenwood’s financial crisis. He struggled to get real answers.

Glenwood is just one of nearly 400 health care facilities owned by MPT and rented out to hospital chains. Nine companies that leased hospitals from MPT have gone bankrupt—including Steward, Glenwood’s former operator. And while dozens of hospitals have been sold, entangled in bankruptcy proceedings, or become depleted shells, MPT’s top brass has earned millions.

This week on Reveal, Mother Jones reporter Hannah Levintova and Reveal producer Ashley Cleek dig into MPT—its history, its business model, and how treating hospitals like financial assets leaves them gutted.

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David Sirota is a journalist, former speechwriter to Bernie Sanders, and co-writer of the Oscar-nominated movie Don’t Look Up, about the threat of climate change. On this week’s More To The Story, Sirota joins host Al Letson to discuss how climate change is fueling more intense weather events like the recent floods in Texas, how the country’s leaders are failing to address climate disasters while avoiding accountability, why Trump’s domestic policy bill is “class war in legislative form,” and why some Democrats still don’t know how to react to socialist Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral primary win in New York City.

Producer: Josh Sanburn | Editor: Kara McGuirk-Allison | Theme music: Fernando Arruda and Jim Briggs | Digital producer: Nikki Frick | Deputy executive producer: Taki Telonidis | Executive producer: Brett Myers | Executive editor: James West | Host: Al Letson

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Read: How Zohran Mamdani Tied Climate Policy to Voters’ Pocketbook Issues (Mother Jones)

Bruce Praet is a well-known name in law enforcement, especially in California. He co-founded a company called Lexipol that contracts with more than 95 percent of police departments in the state and offers its clients trainings and ready-made policies.

In one of Praet’s online training webinars, he offers a piece of advice that policing experts have called inhumane. It’s aimed at protecting officers and their departments from lawsuits.

After police kill someone, they are supposed to notify the family. Instead of delivering the news immediately, Praet advises officers to first ask about the person who was killed to get as much unflattering information as possible.

Reporter Brian Howey started looking into this advice when he was with the Investigative Reporting Program at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism. This week on Reveal, he delves into his finding that officers have been using this tactic across California. He also finds that the information families disclosed before they knew their relative was killed later affected their lawsuits against law enforcement departments.

This is an update of an episode that originally aired in November 2023.

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