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Bi…cameral legislation?
...meaning both houses of Congress.
As opposed to the many famous cases of unicameral American legislation?
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.
"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
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.
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.
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.
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.