# Tenet Healthcare **Tenet Healthcare** is a publicly traded for-profit health system (NYSE: THC) headquartered in Dallas. It is the clearest example of the for-profit pivot **away from hospitals and toward higher-margin outpatient care** within the [[Healthcare Industry Ecosystem]]. ## Scale and the Ambulatory Pivot At the end of 2024, Tenet's hospital segment comprised about **49 acute-care and specialty hospitals** — down sharply after it sold roughly 14 hospitals in 2024 alone for about $5 billion in gross proceeds. The money increasingly comes from its ambulatory arm, **United Surgical Partners International (USPI)**, which by the end of 2025 held interests in more than 500 ambulatory surgery centers and dozens of surgical hospitals. Total company revenue ran above **$21 billion (FY2025)**. ## History Tenet traces to **National Medical Enterprises**, founded in 1969, which rebranded as Tenet in 1995 in the wake of fraud settlements. The company has a long history of legal and regulatory entanglements — including Medicare-billing and kickback settlements — that made it a recurring antagonist in for-profit-hospital critiques. ## Why It Matters Here Tenet shows where the [[For-Profit Hospital]] business model is heading: inpatient care is being treated as a low-margin commodity to be trimmed, while capital flows to outpatient surgery where reimbursement is favorable and overhead is lower. This is the structural reason critics argue the for-profit model systematically under-serves the expensive, around-the-clock inpatient and emergency functions that communities most depend on. Contrast with [[HCA Healthcare]] (scale-and-hold) and [[Community Health Systems]] (debt-driven shrinkage). See [[Healthcare Industry Ecosystem]].