U.S Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) announced today the start of a “share-your-story” campaign, encouraging Connecticut residents to share their experiences regarding Prospect Medical Holdings, the company that owns Waterbury Hospital, Rockville General Hospital and Manchester Memorial Hospital.
“When private equity moves in, hospitals, nurses, doctors, and patients regularly suffer,” said Murphy. “That’s exactly what’s happening in Connecticut due to Prospect Medical’s greed.”
Murphy’s statement accused Prospect of “mismanagement”, and Murphy himself said that Prospect’s takeover, “has depleted these health care facilities of the resources they need, only to provide company executives and shareholders with massive amounts of profit, all while putting patient care at risk and shorting our local communities of the benefits they were promised.”
The senator, who sits on the Senate’s Health Education and Pensions (HELP) Committee, has criticized the role of private equity in healthcare before, and has attacked Prospect’s dealings in Connecticut in particular. In March, Murphy held a roundtable discussion in Waterbury with state and local leaders to discuss the company’s management of Waterbury Hospital, calling it “an abomination.” At a HELP Committee hearing last September, Murphy asserted that Prospect had run the hospitals into the ground.
“Immediately, they started stripping services out of these hospitals,” said Murphy at the time. “All of a sudden, supplies started running short. All of a sudden, specialists couldn’t be found because they were cutting them off of the rolls.”
In another HELP meeting held a week later, Murphy spoke of how Prospect took out a $1.1 billion mortgage on the three hospitals which it set aside as collateral, a deal which he believes company executives knowingly entered with zero intent to pay back.
“They used the hospitals as collateral, they raised $1.1 billion, surely they put that money back into the hospitals to pay for repairs and improve their financial situations?,” Murphy asked rhetorically. “They didn’t do that. In fact, half of that loan — they used the hospitals for collateral — half of that loan went to dividends to investors and executives across the country in California, where Prospect was located.”
Prospect purchased Waterbury Hospital, Manchester Memorial and Rockville General in 2016 for a total of $205 million. Since then, Prospect and its subsidiaries have been embroiled in multiple legal battles regarding the hospitals; one with Yale New Haven Health, which sued in May 2024 to back out a 2022 purchase agreement of the three hospitals for $435 million, and another March 2023, in which a Prospect subsidiary sued the city of Waterbury to lower the Waterbury Hospital’s tax assessment.
In January 2025, Prospect filed for bankruptcy, reaching an agreement with the state late last month allowing for the hospitals to stop care at all three hospitals aside from the ER and behavioral health department at Rockville General.
Prospect is required to provide these reduced services for the next three years. Prospect’s three hospitals will be auctioned off through bankruptcy court.
Waterbury’s Mayor, Paul Pernerewski Jr., said in the March roundtable discussion that Prospect still owes the city $22 million in unpaid taxes, and CT Mirror reported that at the time of Prospect’s initial bankruptcy filing, it owed the state over $67 million in hospital taxes.
Murphy’s office stated that testimony provided to its share-your-story campaign will be used “to inform a forthcoming report on the harmful impact of private equity and profit-seeking in health care.” It also noted that participants may remain anonymous if they so choose. Those interested in sharing their stories can do so here.
“Whether you’re a nurse at Rockville General, or a lifelong patient at Waterbury Hospital or Manchester Memorial, I want to hear your story,” said Murphy. “It was a mistake to let private equity control so much of our health care system, but it’s not too late for us to change course.”
Requests for comment to CT Health Network (Rockville and Manchester Hospitals) and Waterbury Health were not returned in time for publication.
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