If you take issue with increasing prices, monetary inflation (printing money) is the root cause.
Not all is destroyed. Some of the value is diverted to PE wallets. Setting 900k of someone else's value on fire in order to set up a updraft to push 100k into your pocket is a sweet, profitable deal for you.
If we want private ownership of this infrastructure it has to look more like either a utility, where the state has a direct say in service changes and pricing, or a partnership, where unlimited liability flows through to the owners. I’m a fan of the latter.
Limited liability was an amazing invention. But it’s not appropriate for healthcare. Turn these services into partnerships and you’ll see the give-a-shit factor quintuple overnight. (You’ll also probably see a reduction in leverage.)
And non-profit health care orgs should have strict regulation, and the state should appoint some of the members of the board.
Which is to say... these are anecdotes that warrant further investigation, but then ensure effort is required only for equity fund owned services by looking at the whole picture. If there are industry-wide problems and you focus your effort on private equity fund owned services and companies, you might miss an opportunity to improve the entire industry.
That being said... PE funds have a bad reputation for a reason. I would be surprised to find they're not the worst offenders.
The new owners seem content to simply sit back and collect the profits of the company that were previously going to the family that owned the company before.
That is to say, in greater than zero instances, PE has the capacity to be benign.
I think the median PE firm is far worse than the median non-PE firm, but there exist outliers in both groups.
Even the legendary Buffet has bad things to say about PE.
stuaxo•47m ago
Veliladon•45m ago
LMKIIW•33m ago
JumpCrisscross•26m ago
The problem is the rules can be broken with minimal consequence. Swap out PE for another profit-seeking structure and you’ll tend towards the same outcome, as the bad outcompetes the good.
phkahler•7m ago
The optimum might be an employee-owned facility, but even there you'd have incentives to increase profit - everyone would like to get paid more for whatever it is they do. PE has the strongest conflict of interest though, as they are simply investors seeking profit and have nothing else in the game.