Yes, a lot of bills are introduced in one chamber and die in that same chamber. This case is referring to it being introduced by "Senators Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), and Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), along with Representatives Val Hoyle (D-Ore.), Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), and Suhas Subramanyam (D-Va.)", presumably there's a companion bill for the house, since the links seem to only have the Senate version.
Can someone steelman private equity, please? I'm honestly looking for the upsides (for non-investors) of when PE moves into an industry like medicine and begins buying up businesses that traditionally aren't already large chains.
I already hear the downsides frequently from someone whose work is directly affected.
It should be more about making certain levels of consolidation and deep erosion of local ownership illegal.
We have run this country on an assumption that we must give businesses a high amount of freedom. An argument can be made that businesses have been given too much freedom in our system. We’ve allowed Amazon and Ticketmaster and Walmart to exist and they shouldn’t exist in their present form.
Healthcare practices that provide necessary care shouldn’t even really be allowed to be for-profit entities if you ask me. The incentives become too perverse as a result.
Can you define profit? Would a doctor be allowed to earn more than $200 per hour? $300 per hour? $400 per hour? Is a doctor allowed to be paid per procedure or time?
How much would you want to sacrifice your 20s and early 30s? How much would you need to work in the middle of nowhere where your kids won’t have the best opportunities?
Healthcare practices that provide necessary care shouldn’t even really be allowed to be for-profit entities if you ask me. The incentives become too perverse as a result.
Why stop at healthcare? Why not other essentials of life, like food or toilet paper?
You’re absolutely right. For example, we’ve seen the negative impacts from excessive agricultural consolidation.
Many of them already lack profitability without subsidy.
Many agricultural products all pass through the same mega-sized processors and entities. Driscoll’s, Tyson, etc.
We’ve already made things like water and sanitation non-profit/government owned so the idea of doing more of that for food and essentials isn’t that crazy.
You’re absolutely right. For example, we’ve seen the negative impacts from excessive agricultural consolidation.
Like what?
Many of them already lack profitability without subsidy.
That doesn't mean anything without context. How are the non-PE farms doing?
We’ve already made things like water and sanitation non-profit/government owned so the idea of doing more of that for food and essentials isn’t that crazy.
it can't have a national foodborne illness outbreak.
Which is bad for PR and great for clicks, but it's entirely unclear whether we're better off on average. What about all the years where we didn't have a mass outbreak? Would it be better if every state/county had separate food supply chains, and they had the same rate of illness, but it's more randomly dispersed so it doesn't make it to national TV? Think the difference between airplane crash (maybe one incident per year, hundreds of deaths per incident) vs car crashes (40k/year)
"We’ve allowed Amazon and Ticketmaster and Walmart to exist and they shouldn’t exist in their present form."
Do you realize that when Walmart moves into a community, prices charged for everyday things overall drop significantly, both at Walmart and their competition, which means that poor families are able to buy more with every dollar.
They then get to skim the other side of those subsidies, too, since they sell so many items that qualify for SNAP and WIC, as well as being one of the largest if not the largest prescription supplier in the country.
And what happens if walmart closed up shop? Do those employees magically evaporate and not need benefits? Why are we putting the blame on the employee's best employment option?
What competition? When Walmart comes to town, the competition closes.
Why? Because they're sending goon squads to trash all the existing businesses? If walmart replacing "the competition" because they're offering lower prices and consumers are switching, why is this bad?
Healthcare practices that provide necessary care shouldn’t even really be allowed to be for-profit entities if you ask me. The incentives become too perverse as a result.
You don't need to disallow them for necessary care to be provided. You can just have public healthcare programs. That can look like publicly-owned hospitals or regulation that private hospitals must provide certain services under certain conditions if they want to keep operating. Private healthcare then works to provide more than that basic service that fulfills necessary care, to the benefit of the public that can afford more.
That’s a good expansion of the premise, I’d support your idea wholeheartedly. Let PE raid chain restaurants and toy stores, not essential services where they add no value and only extract wealth.
Easy. PE 99% of the time buy businesses that were already failing and provide a lifeline. A failing business can't afford to pay for expensive medical treatments without a loan that a bank will not provide since it is failing.
People who are vehemently against PE generally do not have any idea of how the system works
They don't have to have an in-depth understanding of leveraged finance to get pissed off when their doctors start doubling prices or their own employment conditions get worse or their parents get treated badly in care homes because the staff are now overworked etc. they're mad at the outcomes they're overwhelmingly not actually trying to debate the merits of it from an exit liquidity perspective.
That's one model of private equity, but PE has also been buying up very successful local businesses in areas like veterinary care. The PE firm keeps the name and branding of the local vet because people have traditionally wanted to take their pet to a trusted local vet, not a big chain.
Many medical practices (and other businesses) are poorly operated and administered. I think of my dentist: terrible website (even by 1995 standards), awful at follow up, weird insurance coverage (since she doesn't have time to follow up with new plans it seems) and almost no appointment reminders. There are obvious things to do that could drive business for her.
It makes sense to me that someone could come in and say "hey, let me run the business + finance side of the house while you practice medicine" and at least on paper I can see a real world where that works out for everybody.
Of course, soon you end up with dentists pushing unnecessary procedures and more, so it doesn't always works out that way.
Improving efficiency and optimizing profit are two overlapping segments on the road to crap. It’s not easy to stop the car once you put the bean counters in the driver's seat. If a company is able to do so, it’s usually because there’s a strong leader or culture to resist the slide. But otherwise it’s a thousand small decisions that all seem reasonable on their own.
In human med, it's a pretty standard practice to offer a management company 10% ownership for them to handle the business shit.
I'm not arguing with you; I'm legitimately curious what happened to that model and why PE has swooped in as more attractive to doctors. Maybe it's the payout and/or the fact that they don't have to handle business owner decisions at _all_ anymore?
Many new medical treatments/approaches involve heavy capex (robots, light and ion sources, imaging systems, etc) and removing private money that doesn't belong to individual physicians personally will suck a vast amount of capital out of healthcare, creating significant forces against innovation and deployment.
PE exists because a lot of companies are poorly managed. It's better for your local hospital to be taken over by a PE firm than to go out of business. You can say that it would be even better if the government ran the hospital, and you would be right, but that would require a radical overhaul of the American healthcare system. Until that happens, PE plays a major role in keeping things working.
PE staff are more intelligent and more shrewd than the people running the businesses they buy. Being a good doctor doesn't make you a good businessman.
I'm not a huge fan of PE but the point of economics to deliver cheap and quality goods to consumers not keep people in a job.
In healthcare in US in particular I think the main thing that capital should be (if regulators allow) boutique / specialists that e.g. are the best in the biz at doing MRI scans, in some states my understanding is that it's literally illegal to start a business aiming to make one small part of the process better.
I mean, losing money is not sustainable. If a doctor or physician group isn't business savvy and can't earn a profit they will eventually go under. That's not good for the patient.
Contrary to popular belief, being intelligent in one thing does correlate with being intelligent at other things[1]. For doctors, the comparison with private equity (MBAs?) might be close, but it's not hard to imagine the targets of other PE rollups have owners that are more average in intelligence, think plumbing or roofing.
Which section of that very long article are you claiming supports your assertion?
Here's a bit from the start of the "Concept" section:
> In a famous research paper published in 1904,[8] English psychologist Charles Spearman observed that children's performance measures across seemingly unrelated school subjects were positively correlated. The consistent finding of universally positive correlation matrices of mental test results (or the "positive manifold"), despite large differences in tests' contents, has been described as "arguably the most replicated result in all psychology".[9]
Hard disagree about "more intelligent". They are playing a financial game using a combination of leverage and reptilian ruthlessness to EBITDA hack.
They buy one (or more) companies, often with only the slimmest understanding of what those companies do, slash opex by gutting the company with layoffs (yay EBITDA), maybe staple a few such companies together with leveraged buy-outs, then resell the whole bundle for more than they paid.
From experience, they don't give a single crap whether the resulting mess still functions. They care about selling the company for more than they bought it for. That prospect is only tenuously and at best accidentally related to whether the company still functions.
The private equity companies I've had to deal with were full of braindead MBA spreadsheet monkeys and used car salesmen. Their chief differentiator was that they worked 80 hours a week and were enthusiastic about laying people off without much deliberation.
Thinking private equity is "more intelligent" than business owners is like thinking house flippers are "more intelligent" than home owners. No. They know how to rip out carpet and replace it with laminate on the cheap. They know how to cut corners and hide it. They know buyers will over value a fresh veneer of paint. They don't give a shit about the long-term health or value of the house. They are not better stewards of houses. They specialize in short-term profit maximization and that is literally it.
Remove “more intelligent” here and I’ll give you some benefit.
The problem with healthcare “economics” is that providing high quality care is likely not as profitable as middling care, or sub-standard care.
You say that economics is meant to deliver cheap quality goods, but in reality here economics for PE is value extraction and has nothing to do with consumer good at all - unless of course there’s more profit there. Most of the time, there isn’t.
We know how to make MRI cheaper. Put it in a can. MRI suites are built with copper shielding in the walls, and the machines are really heavy, which creates huge capital costs. (Capex is a big problem for medicine.) There's an easy solution: you can just put an MRI machine in a standard tractor-trailer container and bring the patients in. Nothing has to be constructed or installed.
None of the private equity chains with the sans-serif fonts, simplified logos and trisyllabic names are doing this, though. It's bad marketing. Patients don't want to walk outside to an MRI machine in the parking lot. It feels sketchy. Never mind that they score just as well on the ACR image quality tests as the in-room machines. Who the hell knows what that is?
In reality, it's the county hospitals and big universities that use them! Places that have in-house physicists who can argue for what really makes sense in practice. A major problem with healthcare as a business is that the customer does not usually understand the product, but they still need to buy it, and there are time constraints.
Easy to imagine practices where the primary owner is going to retire and looking for an out.
Maybe they find a buyer in a doctor, maybe they don't, but PE provides them an exit that keeps the practice operating in the community.
Many people don't really run businesses efficiently. There was an interesting video I saw recently where a sole doctor practice made a few changes to their workflow that allowed them to hire more doctors and handle 2x as many people - I would expect a PE firm would pursue similar changes that help increase the number of people they can service, increasing competitiveness and lowering prices in the long run.
I don't know how these tradeoffs interact with patient care, but I wouldn't inherently expect PE to be worse at this than any other operating model.
Lots of other efficiencies to look at. Tons of them are directly bad for the patient (capturing more of the surplus is an efficiency that businesses generally go hard at).
Ultimately, I think the issue is when people making decisions are able to treat the impact as an abstraction.
These businesses would simply stop existing if no purchaser came forward. Many first-world economies face a demographic cliff where boomers are retiring and there is nobody in the next generation who can afford to take over the local dentist office, the HVAC company, etc.
I don’t think that’s true though in all cases. Sometimes PE just offers more money passing the debt into the company they acquire. But smaller players would still take control.
employers expect health care plan costs to rise by an average of 11 percent per worker in 2027, unless benefits are cut
I am sure most workers would prefer to get that extra 11% as a cash raise, but because healthcare costs are out of control the same care costs 11% more.
Certainly some companies will throw up their arms and hire someone overseas instead.
The cap is generous. If an insurance company is hitting it, competition is failing to keep them in check and lifting the cap would just let them gouge deeper. Of course, that doesn't keep them from constantly yapping this talking point, as if it wasn't that way before, as if we don't have evidence that it wouldn't work. "Just lift our profit cap" is self-serving baloney.
Australia is on its way down this path after Brookfield / Healthscope was holding a private hospital hostage against the government and had performance so degraded a child died. Hopefully we (aus) continue down this path of burning off the rot.
The 'fake' price is due to the negotiation of reimbursement between major healthcare chains and insurers. The most regulated piece - Medicare - is the only piece where there's fairly transparent pricing.
Most importantly to fight it as Private Equity is creeping like a cancer into good health systems globally, even in Europe, to slowly but surely siphon away all that is good.
It's important to fight it now before it is too late and other places also fall apart into a degraded, predatory, dystopian US system !
Make it a leverage limit. Otherwise you’ll have other players come in and replicate the playbook.
The short-term fix is banning PE. The long-term one is restricting the leverage these groups can take. Then put limits on upstream leverage. We have these across our economy. We just don’t apply them to this sector.
Medicine is extremely capex intensive and only become more so. Sucking private capital out of healthcare is going to make it vastly worse for everyone; higher prices and less innovation. I think we can criticize the often ruthlessness of PE while realizing that limiting medicine's ability to invest would be a huge self-own and only force further centralization into the biggest non-profit centers.
Medicine is already held back enough by the lack of ability to use debt to finance its sales, unlike almost every other industry; you can repossess a car but you can't repo an implant or administered drug, forcing everything to be paid for in cash upfront. Medicine needs as much access to capital as it can get.
I'm sorry, compared to what? We're not talking about a routine doctor's office for healthy people. Advanced care is extremely technologically intensive and your local surgeon is not personally buying the $20M in infrastructure required for many modern advanced treatments. Venture capital has been essential for progress in medicine, and many advanced therapies are going to be increasingly delivered vertically integrated for the widest accessibility and best outcomes.
I have no words for how completely toxic the surge of PE in healthcare has been. It's driven the degradation of care everywhere I've been. Healthcare chains have no issues with investment (see any annual reporting document to see how much money is sitting in various investments, mostly RE); smaller clinics being eaten up by PE chains is not an answer to centralization, it's just another mechanism of it.
"Private equity" also includes venture capital here. It means all private direct investment. The thing you are imagining is one small corner of what private equity actually is.
It feels to me as if the US is a useful example for the outcomes of a focus on capitalist ideals does for medical services in a country.
Apologies if an AI summary is offensive to some, but here we go:
The US is a world leader in advanced and specialist medicine, but its overall system for providing affordable, accessible, equitable medical care to its citizens ranks poorly—last among the 10 comparable high-income countries in the strongest recent comparison.
I wonder if ai can help doctors reclaim their practices, as the bureaucracy of dealing with insurance may become easier. Administrative overhead must be cheaper with ai. It was the main reason for consolidation and giving up management to hospitals and private equity.
Bi…cameral legislation?
...meaning both houses of Congress.
As opposed to the many famous cases of unicameral American legislation?
Yes, a lot of bills are introduced in one chamber and die in that same chamber. This case is referring to it being introduced by "Senators Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), and Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), along with Representatives Val Hoyle (D-Ore.), Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), and Suhas Subramanyam (D-Va.)", presumably there's a companion bill for the house, since the links seem to only have the Senate version.
Can someone steelman private equity, please? I'm honestly looking for the upsides (for non-investors) of when PE moves into an industry like medicine and begins buying up businesses that traditionally aren't already large chains.
I already hear the downsides frequently from someone whose work is directly affected.
The upside is to the folks who sold the businesses they owned.
Should they be outlawed from selling to certain classes of investor? Which?
It should be more about making certain levels of consolidation and deep erosion of local ownership illegal.
We have run this country on an assumption that we must give businesses a high amount of freedom. An argument can be made that businesses have been given too much freedom in our system. We’ve allowed Amazon and Ticketmaster and Walmart to exist and they shouldn’t exist in their present form.
Healthcare practices that provide necessary care shouldn’t even really be allowed to be for-profit entities if you ask me. The incentives become too perverse as a result.
Can you define profit? Would a doctor be allowed to earn more than $200 per hour? $300 per hour? $400 per hour? Is a doctor allowed to be paid per procedure or time?
How much would you want to sacrifice your 20s and early 30s? How much would you need to work in the middle of nowhere where your kids won’t have the best opportunities?
I updated my comment, I mean a for-profit entity versus non-profit, which the IRS already defines.
Not-for-profit entities can still pay market rate wages to employees and owners.
Should Doctors have a legally enforced max pay? Same with the web devs, max $150K, anything else is just profit driven bullshit right?
No, not-for-profit entities pay market rate salaries. This is already a well-established system.
Why stop at healthcare? Why not other essentials of life, like food or toilet paper?
Hippocratic oath?
You’re absolutely right. For example, we’ve seen the negative impacts from excessive agricultural consolidation.
Many of them already lack profitability without subsidy.
Many agricultural products all pass through the same mega-sized processors and entities. Driscoll’s, Tyson, etc.
We’ve already made things like water and sanitation non-profit/government owned so the idea of doing more of that for food and essentials isn’t that crazy.
Like what?
That doesn't mean anything without context. How are the non-PE farms doing?
sanitation: please see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste_Management,_Inc.
water, but not power, or natural gas?
Google “taylor farms cyclospora” or “tyson beef prices shortage” for an example of the problems of highly consolidated processing.
I wasn’t talking about private equity farms versus not, I’m generally talking about industry consolidation.
Sanitation includes sewers which are typically municipal.
Power and natural gas are legal monopolies with strict rules on pricing.
There are also public electric utilities such as Cleveland Public Power.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_foodborne_illness_outb...
If a product isn't nationally consolidated, it can't have a national foodborne illness outbreak.
Which is bad for PR and great for clicks, but it's entirely unclear whether we're better off on average. What about all the years where we didn't have a mass outbreak? Would it be better if every state/county had separate food supply chains, and they had the same rate of illness, but it's more randomly dispersed so it doesn't make it to national TV? Think the difference between airplane crash (maybe one incident per year, hundreds of deaths per incident) vs car crashes (40k/year)
"We’ve allowed Amazon and Ticketmaster and Walmart to exist and they shouldn’t exist in their present form."
Do you realize that when Walmart moves into a community, prices charged for everyday things overall drop significantly, both at Walmart and their competition, which means that poor families are able to buy more with every dollar.
What do you have against poor people?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boots_theory
And the employer with the largest amount of employees using SNAP benefits is…
Walmart is subsidized by the government to the tune of $2,000 per employee due to their low wages: https://rmfu.org/taxpayer-dollars-subsidize-wal-mart/ [1]
They then get to skim the other side of those subsidies, too, since they sell so many items that qualify for SNAP and WIC, as well as being one of the largest if not the largest prescription supplier in the country.
(25% of Walmart employees qualify for Medicaid https://mafainsurance.com/how-many-walmart-employees-are-on-...)
So their employees on SNAP and Medicaid turn right around and spend that money inside Walmart.
What competition? When Walmart comes to town, the competition closes.
[1] Probably a lot higher since this article is about 20 years old
And what happens if walmart closed up shop? Do those employees magically evaporate and not need benefits? Why are we putting the blame on the employee's best employment option?
Why? Because they're sending goon squads to trash all the existing businesses? If walmart replacing "the competition" because they're offering lower prices and consumers are switching, why is this bad?
They're probably thinking the same thing as those darn busybodies who outlawed child labor.
You don't need to disallow them for necessary care to be provided. You can just have public healthcare programs. That can look like publicly-owned hospitals or regulation that private hospitals must provide certain services under certain conditions if they want to keep operating. Private healthcare then works to provide more than that basic service that fulfills necessary care, to the benefit of the public that can afford more.
If the business is a hospital?
Yes.
I'd expand that to any type of business that has effectively inelastic demand through the ability to hold people emotionally hostage.
So, for example, in addition to hospitals also include veterinarians, funeral services, family planning, etc.
Soulless PE vultures should be barred from all of this.
That’s a good expansion of the premise, I’d support your idea wholeheartedly. Let PE raid chain restaurants and toy stores, not essential services where they add no value and only extract wealth.
Funeral services in the US got aggressively consolidated already, decades ago. Look up SCI - owns over 1,500 funeral homes and 400 cemeteries.
Yes. This is already the case for law firms as they have to be owned and managed by lawyers, in most jurisdictions.
Easy. PE 99% of the time buy businesses that were already failing and provide a lifeline. A failing business can't afford to pay for expensive medical treatments without a loan that a bank will not provide since it is failing.
People who are vehemently against PE generally do not have any idea of how the system works
That's just not true. Distressed and turnaround investing represent less than 20% of PE acquisitions [0].
[0] https://www.ey.com/en_us/insights/private-equity/pulse
They don't have to have an in-depth understanding of leveraged finance to get pissed off when their doctors start doubling prices or their own employment conditions get worse or their parents get treated badly in care homes because the staff are now overworked etc. they're mad at the outcomes they're overwhelmingly not actually trying to debate the merits of it from an exit liquidity perspective.
That's one model of private equity, but PE has also been buying up very successful local businesses in areas like veterinary care. The PE firm keeps the name and branding of the local vet because people have traditionally wanted to take their pet to a trusted local vet, not a big chain.
written by someone who worked in private equity for 20 years:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-06-06/private-e...
https://archive.is/27tJr
Many medical practices (and other businesses) are poorly operated and administered. I think of my dentist: terrible website (even by 1995 standards), awful at follow up, weird insurance coverage (since she doesn't have time to follow up with new plans it seems) and almost no appointment reminders. There are obvious things to do that could drive business for her.
It makes sense to me that someone could come in and say "hey, let me run the business + finance side of the house while you practice medicine" and at least on paper I can see a real world where that works out for everybody.
Of course, soon you end up with dentists pushing unnecessary procedures and more, so it doesn't always works out that way.
Improving efficiency and optimizing profit are two overlapping segments on the road to crap. It’s not easy to stop the car once you put the bean counters in the driver's seat. If a company is able to do so, it’s usually because there’s a strong leader or culture to resist the slide. But otherwise it’s a thousand small decisions that all seem reasonable on their own.
In human med, it's a pretty standard practice to offer a management company 10% ownership for them to handle the business shit.
I'm not arguing with you; I'm legitimately curious what happened to that model and why PE has swooped in as more attractive to doctors. Maybe it's the payout and/or the fact that they don't have to handle business owner decisions at _all_ anymore?
Many new medical treatments/approaches involve heavy capex (robots, light and ion sources, imaging systems, etc) and removing private money that doesn't belong to individual physicians personally will suck a vast amount of capital out of healthcare, creating significant forces against innovation and deployment.
PE exists because a lot of companies are poorly managed. It's better for your local hospital to be taken over by a PE firm than to go out of business. You can say that it would be even better if the government ran the hospital, and you would be right, but that would require a radical overhaul of the American healthcare system. Until that happens, PE plays a major role in keeping things working.
PE staff are more intelligent and more shrewd than the people running the businesses they buy. Being a good doctor doesn't make you a good businessman.
I'm not a huge fan of PE but the point of economics to deliver cheap and quality goods to consumers not keep people in a job.
In healthcare in US in particular I think the main thing that capital should be (if regulators allow) boutique / specialists that e.g. are the best in the biz at doing MRI scans, in some states my understanding is that it's literally illegal to start a business aiming to make one small part of the process better.
What does it mean in this context to be more intelligent and shrewd than the existing owners? Delivering better profit margins?
I mean, losing money is not sustainable. If a doctor or physician group isn't business savvy and can't earn a profit they will eventually go under. That's not good for the patient.
OK, but making money, though it may be less than a PE company would, is. Where do most doctor's offices fall?
What shows that they are more intelligent? They might be better at extracting value from enterprise, but is that generally “more intelligent?”
Well they're considerably better paid and in a business that allows economies of scale.
It's a steelman argument to be clear I'm not entirely convinced by it.
Contrary to popular belief, being intelligent in one thing does correlate with being intelligent at other things[1]. For doctors, the comparison with private equity (MBAs?) might be close, but it's not hard to imagine the targets of other PE rollups have owners that are more average in intelligence, think plumbing or roofing.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G_factor_(psychometrics)
Which section of that very long article are you claiming supports your assertion?
Here's a bit from the start of the "Concept" section:
That explicitly contradicts your assertion.
Hard disagree about "more intelligent". They are playing a financial game using a combination of leverage and reptilian ruthlessness to EBITDA hack.
They buy one (or more) companies, often with only the slimmest understanding of what those companies do, slash opex by gutting the company with layoffs (yay EBITDA), maybe staple a few such companies together with leveraged buy-outs, then resell the whole bundle for more than they paid.
From experience, they don't give a single crap whether the resulting mess still functions. They care about selling the company for more than they bought it for. That prospect is only tenuously and at best accidentally related to whether the company still functions.
The private equity companies I've had to deal with were full of braindead MBA spreadsheet monkeys and used car salesmen. Their chief differentiator was that they worked 80 hours a week and were enthusiastic about laying people off without much deliberation.
Thinking private equity is "more intelligent" than business owners is like thinking house flippers are "more intelligent" than home owners. No. They know how to rip out carpet and replace it with laminate on the cheap. They know how to cut corners and hide it. They know buyers will over value a fresh veneer of paint. They don't give a shit about the long-term health or value of the house. They are not better stewards of houses. They specialize in short-term profit maximization and that is literally it.
Remove “more intelligent” here and I’ll give you some benefit.
The problem with healthcare “economics” is that providing high quality care is likely not as profitable as middling care, or sub-standard care.
You say that economics is meant to deliver cheap quality goods, but in reality here economics for PE is value extraction and has nothing to do with consumer good at all - unless of course there’s more profit there. Most of the time, there isn’t.
Is Apple Inc run for consumer good or value extraction?
We know how to make MRI cheaper. Put it in a can. MRI suites are built with copper shielding in the walls, and the machines are really heavy, which creates huge capital costs. (Capex is a big problem for medicine.) There's an easy solution: you can just put an MRI machine in a standard tractor-trailer container and bring the patients in. Nothing has to be constructed or installed.
None of the private equity chains with the sans-serif fonts, simplified logos and trisyllabic names are doing this, though. It's bad marketing. Patients don't want to walk outside to an MRI machine in the parking lot. It feels sketchy. Never mind that they score just as well on the ACR image quality tests as the in-room machines. Who the hell knows what that is?
In reality, it's the county hospitals and big universities that use them! Places that have in-house physicists who can argue for what really makes sense in practice. A major problem with healthcare as a business is that the customer does not usually understand the product, but they still need to buy it, and there are time constraints.
Easy to imagine practices where the primary owner is going to retire and looking for an out.
Maybe they find a buyer in a doctor, maybe they don't, but PE provides them an exit that keeps the practice operating in the community.
Many people don't really run businesses efficiently. There was an interesting video I saw recently where a sole doctor practice made a few changes to their workflow that allowed them to hire more doctors and handle 2x as many people - I would expect a PE firm would pursue similar changes that help increase the number of people they can service, increasing competitiveness and lowering prices in the long run.
I don't know how these tradeoffs interact with patient care, but I wouldn't inherently expect PE to be worse at this than any other operating model.
Lots of other efficiencies to look at. Tons of them are directly bad for the patient (capturing more of the surplus is an efficiency that businesses generally go hard at).
Ultimately, I think the issue is when people making decisions are able to treat the impact as an abstraction.
These businesses would simply stop existing if no purchaser came forward. Many first-world economies face a demographic cliff where boomers are retiring and there is nobody in the next generation who can afford to take over the local dentist office, the HVAC company, etc.
I don’t think that’s true though in all cases. Sometimes PE just offers more money passing the debt into the company they acquire. But smaller players would still take control.
Nothing a few bills slipped to republican and "moderate" democratic senators won't fix!
They'll still manage to figure out some loophole to do it anyway. PE really is cancer to most industries.
I am sure most workers would prefer to get that extra 11% as a cash raise, but because healthcare costs are out of control the same care costs 11% more.
Certainly some companies will throw up their arms and hire someone overseas instead.
Look up "Medical Loss Ratio" from the ACA if you want to find out where the perverse incentives for health care pricing comes from..
The cap is generous. If an insurance company is hitting it, competition is failing to keep them in check and lifting the cap would just let them gouge deeper. Of course, that doesn't keep them from constantly yapping this talking point, as if it wasn't that way before, as if we don't have evidence that it wouldn't work. "Just lift our profit cap" is self-serving baloney.
How about just “cannot sell for 20 years”?
The usual complaint is going full extractive mode, desperately squeezing profit and selling inside 3-7 years.
So, yeah, we can keep private investment. But they're fucking stuck with it, trying to maintain a healthy business for 20 years.
Australia is on its way down this path after Brookfield / Healthscope was holding a private hospital hostage against the government and had performance so degraded a child died. Hopefully we (aus) continue down this path of burning off the rot.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-03-27/nsw-government-joes-l...
You know what american healthcare really needs is more regulation!
Are you saying it needs less? Why do you think that?
yes. It's completely insane that health insurance A) does all price discovery B) is tied to your employer.
Ask an American hospital how much something costs - you will get a completely fake price back, this is a sign of a totally broken market.
A and B are due to regulations?
[delayed]
The 'fake' price is due to the negotiation of reimbursement between major healthcare chains and insurers. The most regulated piece - Medicare - is the only piece where there's fairly transparent pricing.
I agree. That's insane. But those are both results of not regulating it, not results of regulating it.
Most importantly to fight it as Private Equity is creeping like a cancer into good health systems globally, even in Europe, to slowly but surely siphon away all that is good.
It's important to fight it now before it is too late and other places also fall apart into a degraded, predatory, dystopian US system !
Make it a leverage limit. Otherwise you’ll have other players come in and replicate the playbook.
The short-term fix is banning PE. The long-term one is restricting the leverage these groups can take. Then put limits on upstream leverage. We have these across our economy. We just don’t apply them to this sector.
Medicine is extremely capex intensive and only become more so. Sucking private capital out of healthcare is going to make it vastly worse for everyone; higher prices and less innovation. I think we can criticize the often ruthlessness of PE while realizing that limiting medicine's ability to invest would be a huge self-own and only force further centralization into the biggest non-profit centers.
Medicine is already held back enough by the lack of ability to use debt to finance its sales, unlike almost every other industry; you can repossess a car but you can't repo an implant or administered drug, forcing everything to be paid for in cash upfront. Medicine needs as much access to capital as it can get.
Injecting PE into healthcare is what made it vastly worse for everyone in the first place. You can't have it both ways.
I'm sorry, compared to what? We're not talking about a routine doctor's office for healthy people. Advanced care is extremely technologically intensive and your local surgeon is not personally buying the $20M in infrastructure required for many modern advanced treatments. Venture capital has been essential for progress in medicine, and many advanced therapies are going to be increasingly delivered vertically integrated for the widest accessibility and best outcomes.
I have no words for how completely toxic the surge of PE in healthcare has been. It's driven the degradation of care everywhere I've been. Healthcare chains have no issues with investment (see any annual reporting document to see how much money is sitting in various investments, mostly RE); smaller clinics being eaten up by PE chains is not an answer to centralization, it's just another mechanism of it.
"Private equity" also includes venture capital here. It means all private direct investment. The thing you are imagining is one small corner of what private equity actually is.
[delayed]
It feels to me as if the US is a useful example for the outcomes of a focus on capitalist ideals does for medical services in a country.
Apologies if an AI summary is offensive to some, but here we go:
Both sources are the same site:
https://www.commonwealthfund.org/sites/default/files/2024-09...
https://www.commonwealthfund.org/publications/fund-reports/2...
I wonder if ai can help doctors reclaim their practices, as the bureaucracy of dealing with insurance may become easier. Administrative overhead must be cheaper with ai. It was the main reason for consolidation and giving up management to hospitals and private equity.