Capone's new framing of the company’s work with asylum seekers comes after the executive took fire from elected officials for his company’s $432 million no-bid contract to help manage the city’s migrant crisis.
Just last month, at the Canaccord Genuity 43rd Annual Growth Conference, Capone expressed enthusiasm for political gridlock, which ensures revenue growth by providing a steady flow of migrants into the publicly traded company’s care.
“There’s almost no chance that there’s going to be federal legislation which solves this problem. Almost none,” Capone said. “All you have to do is understand the dilemmas with each one of the solutions and know that it will not happen. It’s certainly not happening before the next election cycle. But I doubt it will ever happen.”
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In his letter, Lander called out the remark as suggesting that “the CEO seems eager to capitalize on the fact that the longer asylum seekers remain in their care, the more the company’s revenue will grow.”
Lander fretted that the company “has little incentive to assist the asylum seekers in its care to obtain legal services and work authorization that would enable them to leave shelter.”
Capone’s stark departure this week is perhaps an attempt at damage control after a spate of news stories suggesting that DocGo employees were lying to migrants and stranding them in hotels without transportation.
DocGo has recently experienced a burst of growth, owing in large part to the Covid-19 pandemic, followed by a shift to mobile healthcare services that include the company’s work with migrants. To date, mobile service makes up roughly 70% of DocGo’s business, Capone said at that Wednesday conference, while ambulance transportation represents about 30%.
Covid-19 testing made up roughly a third of the company's $318.7 million in revenue in 2021. Currently, the company has “almost no Covid revenue,” Capone said, but in 2022 still managed to exceed its revenue for the previous year to generate $440.50 million in earnings.
He said the company continues to grow because DocGo’s work with governments during the pandemic created a foundation to build relationships and expand the services it provides clients.
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For example, Capone said DocGo worked with another city to provide Covid-19 testing services at a homeless shelter, and that work then evolved into delivering primary care for those individuals.
“Covid allowed us to kind of get our foot in the door and prove our value of these widespread massive programs to municipalities,” Capone said, “but then expand those programs into something that was much more intensive and involved in the whole care continuum for these underserved populations.”
He added DocGo’s ability to be nimble in the face of emergencies has given the company a competitive edge in the medical services space.
“In many of the contracts that we have, we're just simply the only one that could do the service,” said Capone. “You don’t find groups that with a couple of days notice [have the ability to] leverage this really comprehensive logistics backbone that brings together a one-stop solution and can do so with almost no notice. There's really nobody that can do that today."
This story first appeared in Crain's New York Business.
