[iamtheworstdev]

the largest issue in American health care is private equity and middle men raising the cost of everything.

edit if doctor scarcity were the issue then doctors would have a lot more leverage in salary negotiations than they do, which is to say they don't have much. because the hiring practices are limited by what they can bill, which they have no power over.

[doomslayer999]

Private Equity is the effect not the cause. We need them to create efficiency because of the shenanigans that the AMA guild did in limiting doctor supply. Just allow people to take an exam to get credentialed, we'd have foreign doctors flown in by the hundreds of thousands and care would be as cheap as it is in India.

[iamtheworstdev]

private equity doesn't create efficiencies. The real world is not some MicroEcon 101 class.

> “As our investigation revealed, these financial entities are putting their own profits over patients, leading to health and safety violations, chronic understaffing, and hospital closures. Take private equity firm Leonard Green and hospital operator Prospect Medical Holdings: documents we obtained show they spent board meetings discussing profit maximization tactics—cost cutting, increasing patient volume, and managing labor expenses—with little to no discussion of patient outcomes or quality of care at their hospitals. And while Prospect Medical Holdings paid out $645 million in dividends and preferred stock redemption to its investors—$424 million of which went to Leonard Green shareholders—it took out hundreds of millions in loans that it eventually defaulted on. Private equity investors have pocketed millions while driving hospitals into the ground and then selling them off, leaving towns and communities to pick up the pieces.”

https://www.grassley.senate.gov/news/news-releases/private-e...

[watwut]

Private Equity does not create efficiency and we do not need them. What they do is to take debt to buy healthy companies, transfer debt onto them and then kill them.

None of that is efficiency in any reasonable sense.

[lazyasciiart]

That doesn’t make sense - private equity has done the same thing in completely orthogonal industries, like manufacturing.

[pembrook]

Ugh I wish this braindead populist 'private equity boogieman' meme that's taken ahold of reddit-types would die.

No, private equity is not the reason healthcare costs in the US are out of control, you can even ask chatgpt.

PE is a 3rd tier mild symptom in certain niche health markets that sits downstream of all the structural root issues created due to the twisted public/private incentive misalignment nightmare of US healthcare.

[Eisenstein]

People would have an opportunity to change their stance if you explain why they should hold a different one with evidence and persuasion. Berating them and then saying they are wrong without explaining why is not going to change anyone's mind.

[pembrook]

I used to do that when HN was a more rational, thinking-man's place years ago.

It's been poisoned by the hysterical climate of US politics like everything else on the internet, so there are no thinking men left.

It's a lost cause. If I were to explain the situation rationally I would get downvoted for not cheering on the shooting of CEOs.

Upvote communities are all dead and dying. There are no more interesting conversations happening in them anymore.