Oral Roberts

Televangelist Oral Roberts founded the City of Faith Medical and Research Center in 1981, an $80 million, 60-story hospital envisioned to combine modern medicine with divine healing, but the facility was a catastrophic financial failure that filed for bankruptcy in 1987, with its assets eventually acquired by National Medical Enterprises, which later became Tenet Healthcare.

Oral Roberts was a prominent American televangelist and faith healer whose ambitious, ultimately disastrous foray into hospital administration profoundly impacted the early history of the entity that would become Tenet Healthcare. In 1981, Roberts announced the construction of the City of Faith Medical and Research Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma, a massive, $80 million, 60-story medical complex that he claimed would be divinely guided to cure diseases that modern medicine could not. Roberts famously declared that God would reveal to him the names of 100,000 donors who would each contribute $1,000 to fund the project, a fundraising strategy that ultimately failed to materialize, leaving the facility severely undercapitalized from its inception. The City of Faith opened in 1987 but was immediately plagued by massive cost overruns, low patient volumes, and a fundamental lack of understanding of the complex economics of acute care hospital operations, forcing Roberts to file for bankruptcy later that same year. The facility's assets were eventually acquired by National Medical Enterprises (NME), a rapidly growing hospital management company that was aggressively consolidating the industry, and this acquisition injected the toxic legacy of the City of Faith failure into the corporate DNA of what would eventually become Tenet Healthcare following the 1995 NME-AMI merger.