Rest of article.'Brookfield has been struggling to turn around...

Rest of article.

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Brookfield has been struggling to turn around the business – the owner of 38 healthcare facilities including Sydney’s Northern Beaches Hospital and Gold Coast Private Hospital – which it boiught for $4.1 billion in 2019.

At the time, private healthcare was booming. The Canadian asset management giant faced down interest from Melbourne’s BGH Capital and industry super fund AustralianSuper to snap up the company.

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Since then, however, things have become more difficult. Instead of preparing Healthscope for a float, Brookfield has been forced to inject emergency funding into the company, warning a soaring wage bill means it is on borrowed time unless governments or insurers provide more money.

The asset manager appears to have little appetite to provide more funding, and Healthscope has been negotiating with lenders for months.

While Brookfield has remained silent, major investors have been considering their options. David Di Pilla, the former UBS dealmaker who now runs HMC Capital, is among them, while rivals like ASX-listed Ramsay Health Care could consider buying some of the better-performing Healthscope assets, analysts have suggested.

Financial restructuring

On Thursday, Healthscope told staff that Mr Horan would continue as chief executive until a handover was completed in coming weeks before resuming his role as a managing director in Brookfield’s Private Equity Group.

“During this time, Tino will be visiting as many of our hospitals as possible, getting to know our operations and meeting staff and [visiting medical officers],” Mr Chersky said, adding that he would be stepping down to focus on his responsibilities with the same private equity division.

Mr La Spina acted as an adviser to cancer treatment provider GenesisCare during its financial restructuring as it emerged from Chapter 11 bankruptcy in the United States, and oversaw international operations at Qantas, where he worked for 14 years until 2020.

He later worked at Boral but left during cost-cutting after the Stokes family’s SGH Limited acquired a significant stake in the building materials group.

He will confront a complicated private health landscape, with insurers and hospitals in the midst of a public stoush about who should pay for rapidly rising medical costs and wage bills.

Last year, Healthscope attacked Bupa in an advertising campaign accusing the insurer of profit gouging. It later proposed charging Bupa customers extra for treatment at its hospitals. The companies finally reached a deal late last month.