[conductr]

I’ve hands on done these roll ups in mass (a ton of tiny M&A deals) and I would not characterize the physicians that way at all. They are generally fairly savvy small business owners and they always saw their practice as a retirement/nest egg. They also tend to burn out on all the insane regulations/insurance/employer/etc hoops they have to jump through and as a small business they tend not to have negotiating power or the scale to leverage shared services. These are the primary benefits of the roll up along with jacking up prices as much as possible obviously.

Like many physicians these days, they see benefits of just being a W2 employee. It’s also a demographic wave, there’s a lot of near retirement folks that are winding down and these PE firms are providing liquidity for their practice. For the consumer though, it’s probably not a good thing at all

[trhway]

As result of the acquisition you may notice appearance of a business practice manager - a non-vet guy lurking behind the nurses and doctors at whom they all look trying to understand whether he approves or disapproves each and every action they do/say.

[ShrigmaMale]

Similar experience in PE a while back, know a lot of people who still do it, and yeah a lot of small business owners are cashing out right now as boomers retire. Between that and all the dry powder PE has on hand after recent massive raises there will be a lot of buying businesses going on, lots more than even a decade back. Especially now that inflation is stressing retirement savings and costs of everything are rising so fast while people will be looking more to private markets to up returns in bad economic conditions.