MA Hospital Owner Tenet Earned $3.48 Billion In 2022: Filing

WORCESTER, MA — The for-profit Texas health giant that owns three major hospitals in Massachusetts earned nearly $3.5 billion in 2021, a 10 percent increase from the previous year, according to a new financial filing.

Dallas-based Tenet Health owns St. Vincent Hospital in Worcester — the site of a 10-month nurses strike last year — and the MetroWest Medical Center hospitals in Natick and Framingham. According to Tenet's 2021 annual report, the company earned $3.48 billion in 2021. After expenses, the company cleared about $194 million in profit in 2021.

The 2021 filing marked the third year when Tenet topped the previous year's earnings. The company reported $2.73 billion in earnings before expenses in 2019 and $3.14 billion in 2020 — a year when Tenet had to close parts of hospitals due to the emergence of COVID-19. The company also received hundreds of millions in federal stimulus payments related to the pandemic across 2020 and 2021.

Tenet's annual filing also reported on a number of risk factors facing the company, and named union activity as one pitfall. About 27 percent of Tenet's employees belong to a union, according to the filing.

"When we are negotiating collective bargaining agreements with unions ... work stoppages and strikes may occur, as they did at one of our hospitals in 2021," the filing said. "Although relatively uncommon, extended strikes have had, and could in the future have, an adverse effect on our patient volumes, net operating revenues and labor costs at individual hospitals or in local markets."

The company spent $33 million fighting the St. Vincent strike, according to an estimate by the Worcester Business Journal. The hospital also had to hire scores of replacements for the over 500 nurses who went on strike. One of those nurses, C. Richard Avola, filed a petition to decertify the Massachusetts Nurses Union (MNA) at St. Vincent Hospital.

The anti-union National Right to Work Foundation law firm is representing Avola, who St. Vincent leaders have supported. In a Feb. 10 email to hospital nurses, St. Vincent CEO Carolyn Jackson promised not to cut pay or benefits if the nurses voted to decertify the MNA.

"As I have stated on several occasions before, I would love the opportunity to show you what Saint Vincent Hospital can be like without the MNA present. So please vote. And please vote 'NO,'" the email said.

The nurses will finish voting on the decertification effort on Monday. MNA leaders say they are confident the nurses will vote to retain the union.

At the same time, Tenet has settled labor issues with three other unions in Massachusetts. In December, Laborers' International Union of North America workers at Leonard Morse Hospital in Natick agreed to a new contract. Framingham Union service workers got a new contract in July, and United Food and Commercial Workers at St. Vincent agreed to a new contract in March.

The earnings reported by Tenet in the 2021 annual filing beat Wall Street expectations. The research firm FactSet initially projected Tenet would post 2021 earnings of $3.301 billion.