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lecture me about finding the story of a file, the dramatic thread that ran through a particular matter. He believed that when you stripped away the dry terminology and the rigid structure of the legal forms, even the most unexceptional transactions contained the elements of drama.
    Back then I thought he was crazy, that he’d spent so much time drafting prospectuses and parsing proxy statements that it had affected his brain. But lately I’d come to realize that he was right. Tonight I was even doing it myself, piecing together the fragments of the story and looking for the nuances in what had been left unsaid.
    I began by reading through a sheaf of newspaper clippings I’d found at the bottom of the box. I don’t know who was responsible for compiling them, but there was no doubt they presented an interesting picture of the Health Care Corporation of America. HCC was a company that likened medical specialties to product lines and had pioneered the practice of providing financial incentives to physicians and administrators for meeting financial performance targets. Not unexpectedly, shareholders were ecstatic with the company’s performance, while the medical community was substantially less impressed. A Wall Street Journal profile of the company’s acquisition of a string of community hospitals in Duluth seemed to exemplify HCC’s style of operation.
    Within an eight-month period Health Care Corporation, under the guidance of CEO Gerald Packman, bought eight of the twelve hospitals serving the greater Duluth area. Once they effectively controlled the number of beds, they began slashing costs across the board, negotiating discounts with suppliers, centralizing administrative operations, and dramatically cutting the number of beds. They closed three hospitals completely. They also eliminated overtime, cut the staff of registered nurses by a third, and began limiting patient access to unprofitable tests and treatments. The unspoken conclusion of the article was that under the HCC system, profitability went up as the quality of patient care came down.
    But Prescott Memorial was not the same as a community hospital in Duluth. It was a charitable teaching hospital as committed to providing care to an indigent inner-city population as it was to educating new doctors. It was also a trauma center, one of the seven hospitals within the city limits that was tied to the 911 system. What that meant was that at Prescott Memorial they had not just a ready operating room, but surgeons, anesthesiologists, and a full blood bank ready round the clock.
    Claudia had laid out the practical implications of this when I’d questioned the efficiency of keeping a trauma team on twenty-four-hour call. She’d explained that when someone has a bullet in their heart, the only place they can be treated is in an operating room. If they are taken to another hospital in the city, they may have equally skilled surgeons, but it might take them thirty-five or forty-five minutes to mobilize their operating room, and with each minute that elapses for a critical patient, the potential for survival falls dramatically.
    In the parlance of HCC, trauma care was one of Prescott Memorial Hospital’s strongest product lines. It was also one of its least profitable. As I waded through the last three years’ financial statements I could easily understand HCC’s appeal to Kyle Massius, Prescott Memorial’s president. For him, the sale represented deliverance from the constant begging and scraping for donations, a transition to operating on solid financial ground.
    Indeed, the more I read, the less I questioned the three board members’ eagerness to jump on the HCC bandwagon. Instead, what puzzled me was that HCC would want to take on the financial burden of Prescott Memorial Hospital at all. Did they really think that they could squeeze a profit out of providing trauma care, or were they planning on shutting down the trauma center altogether in order to provide