It’s about time.
Since opening in 2021, Johnstown Heights has earned a reputation as a house of horrors, with understaffing, poorly maintained facilities, a lack of care and criticism from both former patients and staff.
Even more eerie, the facility bears a legacy of psychiatry’s evil nature: It’s not the first time patients were met with a hardhearted lack of concern and profound abuse in that building, and it’s not the first time a patient died within those walls.
Johnstown Heights was twice given “immediate jeopardy” ratings by state inspectors.
The center has operated under two different names and ownerships. When the 92-bed center was known as Clear View Behavioral Health, a patient named Tibor Hetei died there in 2017 after staff gave him a powerful cocktail of psychotropic drugs called a “B-52” and left him to die unsupervised and alone.
In 2020, Clear View—which had been under investigation for insurance fraud, abuse and holding patients for too long in order to reap more insurance money—was shuttered by Colorado authorities after five years in business.
But the enforcement action didn’t matter. Only 10 months later, it was reopened as Johnstown Heights Behavioral Health and patients and staff complained it had exactly the same problems that existed at Clear View.
The brutality lived on.
Once, a patient under observation for suicide threats who was refusing to leave was carried outside by their arms and legs and dumped in the parking lot.
State regulators wrote, “The facility’s failure created the likelihood, if not immediately corrected, of serious harm affecting patients.”
But still, Johnstown Heights was allowed to stay open for business, well beyond the time most people believe it should have been shut down.
Repeated media excoriations caused investigators to begin buzzing around the hospital like angry bees, and Johnstown Heights was twice given “immediate jeopardy” ratings by state inspectors, the most serious determination the agencies can issue.
Patients told local media, “What they are doing is not right. We shouldn’t be held longer than we need to be,” while another said the center was keeping patients there to make more money off them.
Yet another complained, “They are all about the profit. It’s just not right.”
Former staffer Franceska Costamagna said understaffing at the facility caused a situation “which is extremely dangerous, not only to the patients, but to the staff as well.”
A nurse at the facility put it this way: Patients “are being warehoused. They’re being kept longer than they need to be because [Johnstown Heights] wants heads in beds. They want the facility filled. They want the insurance money. It’s dangerous for staff. It’s dangerous for the other patients.”
The center knew very well they were operating improperly. The nurse said that, when inspectors were coming, “they would staff up. They would call people in and say it was all hands on deck. Everybody’s got to be here so it appeared to the state that they were fully staffed.”
Johnstown Heights is merely a single glaring example of a disturbing national trend.
Another former staffer, B.J. Potts, said the mental health center “was a disaster waiting to happen. In so many ways, Johnstown Heights is a s—hole. Nothing they’re doing is helping the patients. There are no safety measures and you’re lucky if you can get out of there alive.”
Not everyone was that lucky.
On November 13, 2022, Christopher Dickson died. His condition required hourly nursing checks, but he had not been checked for eight hours by the time of his death.
Dickson was in for alcohol detoxification. State authorities found that “the facility failed to ensure registered nurses assessed detox patients in 14 of 16 records reviewed. The facility’s failure created the likelihood of serious harm affecting patients.”
“Immediate jeopardy?”
Immediate? It would still be two more years before Johnstown Heights closed its doors.
And of course, let’s not start celebrating just yet. Nothing stops another company from coming in and reopening Clear View, or Johnstown Heights, or whatever name they want to hang on the hellhole, and make a ton of money before, eventually, they too will be shut down, and the whole miserable cycle can start again.
Why is this happening? Well, the old Demon Dollar is having its sway. And we’re not talking about chump change here.
The American Hospital Directory, at the end of 2023, found that Johnstown Heights reported a staggering $34,594,460 in total patient revenue.
But Johnstown Heights is merely a single glaring example of a disturbing national trend in ownership of “mental health” centers—takeovers by major corporations drawn by easy money.
Colorado health authorities have some explaining to do.
Let’s just admit it: Psychiatry is a complete and utter scam, an immoral, worthless hustle pulling in big, big money from insurance, both private and governmental. Unlike medicine, psychiatry is a quack pseudoscience that offers no proof that the conditions it claims to treat even exist. Publicly funded psychiatric facilities are bad enough and are their own horror stories. But when you bring Private Equity (PE) firms, the whole game changes—for far worse—because PE companies exist not to care for patients but to make money.
Johnstown Heights is only a symptom—PE ownership of mental facilities is the disease.
They cut costs, cut staff, cut facility care and increase the time that patients remain institutionalized beyond the legally mandated limit in state involuntary commitment regulations to get more money for their patients’ so-called “treatment” from Medicare, Medicaid and private insurance.
Johnstown Heights is part of Summit Behavioral Health Care, a whopping corporate owner of 38 facilities in 20 states.
In a puzzling game of corporate musical chairs, Summit in turn is owned by Patient Square Capital and, before that, it was FFL Partners and Lee Equity Partners and Flexpoint Ford. Confused yet?
The Private Equity Stakeholder Project published a report that reads: “Private equity investment carries substantial risk for behavioral health services, including the potential for inadequate staffing or reliance on untrained and unlicensed staff, pressure on physicians to provide unnecessary and costly services, or abuse of federal funding programs at the expense of patient care.”
Yet we still allow it.
Johnstown Heights wasn’t even forced to close—it did so voluntarily, just one short step ahead of state investigators prying into the barbaric facility.
CEO Sabrina Gibson said the closure was caused by a “comprehensive review of business and operational dynamics in the Colorado market.” She even bragged: “Johnstown Heights remains fully licensed in good standing by the State of Colorado and accredited by The Joint Commission.”
That’s the question, isn’t it: Why, after a death, after investigations, after statements of Johnstown Heights’ abuse and mistreatment of patients, were they allowed to ride off into the sunset with their reputation intact?
Colorado health authorities have some explaining to do.
The Private Equity Stakeholder report noted a huge increase in PE ownership of mental health facilities, “particularly in firms specializing in autism, eating disorders and addiction treatment,” and all the most popular so-called “mental problems.”
State investigating boards need to step up their supervision of these facilities—with full awareness that PE ownership only encourages patient abuse, fraud and downright illegal behavior—and, if necessary, quickly shut them down.
After all, government agencies are our only protection against corporate greed.
No doubt Christopher Dickson and Tibor Hetei would agree, if only they were still alive to do so.
In their names, we must step up and demand a change.
