Death rates rose in hospital ERs after private equity firms took over

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/death-rates-rose-hospital-ers-private-equity-firms-took-study-finds-rcna233211

204•coloneltcb•1h ago

Comments

derbOac•1h ago

My impression is a lot of US health care problems are caused in part by a sort of unholy combination of restricted competition and access, together with profit driven market participants. So you end up with this marketplace constricted by overregulation — some well-meaning but often basically occurring because of protectionist moats and regulatory capture — increasingly controlled by profiteers trying to extract as much money as possible, with patients at the bottom, providers in the middle, and executives at the top. I think the problems with monopolies in the US are broad in scope but it hits healthcare especially hard because of how grotesquely distorted it is.

I'm not surprised by this finding, although I find in economics and healthcare forums the results tend to be misused (at least in my opinion), because it gets used to argue against any deregulation or cost cutting, instead of cost cutting of the type that tends to happen for the benefit of investors and shareholders, rather than cost cutting of the type that increases healthcare options and access.

palmotea•1h ago

> So you end up with this marketplace constricted by overregulation — some well-meaning but often basically occurring because of protectionist moats and regulatory capture

Don't hand-wave your claim of overregulation, be specific and name the regulations you think should go away.

pfdietz•58m ago

> Don't hand-wave your claim of overregulation, be specific and name the regulations you think should go away.

Regulations that prevent construction of new hospitals without some sort of "demonstration of need".

myrmidon•49m ago

How would higher hospital density help quell healthcare costs, though?

Isn't that just more infrastructure, administration overhead and staffing that victims have to pay for, in the end?

wat10000•44m ago

Where would you expect bananas to be cheaper: a town with five grocery stores, or a town with one?

ceejayoz•43m ago

I mean, that depends. A town with ten people and five grocery stores will be inefficient, and probably have very expensive produce as a result.

wat10000•29m ago

A town with ten people won't have five grocery stores in the first place. Nobody's going to spend a bunch of money to open a store in a place where there isn't a customer base to support it.

ceejayoz•24m ago

> Nobody's going to spend a bunch of money to open a store in a place where there isn't a customer base to support it.

Tell that to the waves of cupcake shops, craft breweries, and now cannabis dispensaries in my area.

wat10000•19m ago

Right, luxury items are definitely an apt analogy here. Man, people really do love to argue, huh.

goodpoint•3m ago

There is such thing as market failure due to oversaturation.

palmotea•40m ago

> Where would you expect bananas to be cheaper: a town with five grocery stores, or a town with one?

I'm not defending the "Certificate of Need" regulations, but your thinking is sloppy: healthcare is not a product like bananas. That analogy will mislead more than it will inform.

If every person has to buy 10 bananas a day or they will die, the town with 5 stores may have more expensive bananas, because they can just raise prices to cover the excess capacity and people will pay.

wat10000•24m ago

If we look at "food" more generically, rather than bananas specifically, we are literally in that situation where every person has to have X amount per day or they will die. And competition still works great.

There are two things that set healthcare apart here. One is that sometimes people need unusual treatments to stay alive that are extremely expensive, and our desire not to let people die is at odds with the normal market mechanism where products that cost too much just don't get purchased. The other is that sometimes people have emergencies so urgent they can't really choose their provider.

But the vast majority of healthcare doesn't fall into those categories, and normal market mechanisms work fine for those. Competition would lower prices for most healthcare just like it does for food and everything else.

ajmurmann•16m ago

They can't just raise the prices because people will bring their business to the competition. I've personally done this for CT scans. In my local market we literally got a scan for 2k where the hospital we'd usually go to wanted 10k.

The same works for non-emergency surgery as well. Take a look at https://surgerycenterok.com/ it's such a breath of fresh air to see the full price for each procedure right there. People travel there from all over the country to get needed procedures. So competition clearly works but the system doesn't really enable it. For example insurers don't want to work with the linked center because they won't give them rebates but charge everyone the same price. More details: https://www.econtalk.org/keith-smith-on-free-market-health-c...

h2zizzle•36m ago

The town where you can see the banana prices on the shelves, if not online, and where there's a collective refusal to pay (perhaps through an organizer payer) if the price is too high.

cogman10•31m ago

In the town closest to central america.

The labor to produce, ship, and shelve the banana determine it's cost along with whatever margin the store that sells the banana is willing to take. Walmart, for example, could be perfectly willing to sell a banana at a loss if they think that will get you in to buy a TV.

This is why dollar stores exist and often kill off local grocers. They can sell a lot of non-perishable goods at a loss and win back by understaffing the location and overcharging on non-perishable goods.

I live in a city with probably around 50 different clinics, but they are all associated with 3 major medical groups. It isn't a lack of buildings that's preventing competition.

anubistheta•31m ago

Exactly. The more suppliers are in a market, the more competition there is. Thus lower prices and a better selection. People don't like a monopoly is other areas of life. Healthcare is no different.

myrmidon•28m ago

I don't think that is a good comparison at all.

Unlike grocery stores, hospital ERs don't get frequent repeat customer interaction, so that makes the competition aspect basically completely inapplicable.

As typical ER visitor,

- You wont know what "quality" of care you are going to get beforehand

- You will have very limited capability of selecting the hospital

- You will be unable to compare prices beforehand

So why would any of those 5 hypothetical hospitals decrease prices?

More competitors won't do shit if the market is uncompetitive by design.

esafak•22m ago

That's what reviews and word of mouth are for. Don't you do research before picking a hospital and doctor?

We do need price transparency though.

wat10000•21m ago

An ER is only a small part of what a typical hospital provides. And life-threatening, must-get-treatment-immediately-or-die emergencies are only a small part of what a typical ER provides.

Yes, there are some kinds of care that aren't very amenable to competitive market forces, but the vast majority is.

cogman10•17m ago

How could you even compare prices?

If you go in because of a killer stomach ache you could end up needing a CT and emergency surgery. Or you could end up getting some pepto-bismol.

And if you are taken there by an ambulance (which you also have no ability to compare any price to). You'll be sent to the hospital the paramedics decides to drop you off at.

There is an inherent complete lack of information when going in for a medical situation that can't be fixed by the free market. You need (or believe you need) treatment now. There's no way for you to know what that treatment will be.

Even going in for an annual physical can be the exact same. Some dicey numbers on your blood work and you might be looking at some huge unplanned bills that are completely unavoidable.

shawn_w•16m ago

>Unlike grocery stores, hospital ERs don't get frequent repeat customer interaction...

Oh yes they do. I can think of any number of patients I'm familiar with who end up in the ER multiple times a week. Practically daily for some people. And a few who are known for getting discharged from one hospital and immediately heading to another nearby one.

jasonlotito•9m ago

1. One accepts only Visa, one only MC, one only Amex, one only cash, and one only accept bitcoin.

2. One offers bananas to walk in visitors, but the others have a minimum wait time of 1 month to a year.

3. One is a mile away. One is an hour away. Still in the same county.

4. None of them offer an easy to understand menu. You can't just order a banana. You ahve to order Banana Services and meet with Banana specialists. You can't take the banana home.

5. You wake up in a banana shop and you didn't get a chance to shop around before being presented with a bill. They don't take your payment of choice, so it's 10 times as expensive.

6. Some won't let you buy a banana. Instead, you have to buy a banana service. Per banana pricing is the lowest here, but the total cost is higher if you just want a banana.

Which banana store do you buy from? A, B, C, D, or E?

I'll take the first choice you make and let you know if you picked correctly. Anything other than the correct choice is a failure.

taeric•8m ago

My expectation on cost of banana will be more on how much it costs to ship to said town? Similarly, which town has higher tax burden to cover? Assuming any sort of health inspection on places that store food, the town with more stores has a higher burden.

Which is all to say, my gut is it is far more complicated than that allows for. Not a useless model, but also not a very actionable one.

pfdietz•38m ago

But the victims don't have to pay for it -- excess infrastructure is a bad investment that those who built it pay for. The builders are not guaranteed a return on their investment.

myrmidon•12m ago

I don't really get it.

If you are arguing that the customer is not paying for inefficient providers, then I strongly disagree.

Customers always end up paying for inefficient supply chains. If you end up with an inefficient allocation of hospitals/doctors (local overprovisioning), it's always gonna be the patients that are gonna pick up the bill for this in the end through higher average prices.

Inefficiencies are doubly bad because you potentially don't just pay the pure cost for the inefficiency (middlemen, waste etc.) you even pay for margins on top.

I think the assumption that such inefficiencies could lead to actual savings for customers (by magically making the providers decrease their profit margins) is highly overoptimistic.

vlovich123•36m ago

No, actually it would be lower for the same reason competition always leads to lower prices. Uncompetitive hospitals that can’t meet need would naturally go out of business.

A “need” certificate is similar to the cap that med schools have - it’s effectively a pricing cartel to keep salaries/revenue high

milesskorpen•26m ago

There are extremely high fixed costs + we require hospitals to do unprofitable work (they aren't allowed to turn anyone away from the ED, for example). In many small regional chains, their profitable hospitals in one area fund unprofitable hospitals in other regions.

Overall we have a crisis of hospitals shutting down, not a crisis of oversupply.

jplrssn•11m ago

> competition always leads to lower prices

I don't see how this could be true for emergency visits. Would an ambulance drive you to the cheapest hospital within some fixed radius?

hamdingers•2m ago

Hospitals typically lose money on emergency visits and make it back on scheduled inpatient care and outpatient services, so that scenario isn't relevant.

opo•26m ago

Here is a summary of a number of studies of the effects of Certificates of Need:

https://ij.org/report/striving-for-better-care/overwhelming-...

h2zizzle•38m ago

Oh, well that's BS. Urgent care clinics have proliferated like crazy over the post decade or so. The supply to fill the vast majority of urgent medical needs which hospital ERs used to have to carry alone is there. But it's true that that supply often goes unused. Why? Because ERs HAVE to tend to and stabilize patients when they present; UCCs can turn you away if you can't demonstrate the ability to pay.

The problem is not restrictions on medical facility construction, it's inefficient use of what we already have.

In general, America has an issue with defaulting to "building new", as if we have an everlasting greenfield, rather than careful provisioning of the already overbuilt infrastructure base. Capitalists love being freed of prior obligations, with no regard for how they contribute to an even more unwieldy set of obligations in the future. Enough. You can't just do as you like. Help solve the actual problem.

pfdietz•37m ago

BS, eh?

https://www.health.ny.gov/facilities/cons/

alostpuppy•31m ago

That’s just New York, yeah? Does every state have similar regulations?

pfdietz•30m ago

So, unless every state has a regulation, that regulation doesn't exist and has no effect?

Any other goal lines you want to redraw? Let's get that out of the way now instead of going back and forth.

(To answer: in my personal experience Illinois also has such a regulation.)

ch4s3•23m ago

Slightly more than half have CoN laws and other states have a number of restrictions of facility construction that complicate building smaller clinics.

kotaKat•25m ago

Yeah, that one actually fucked us over rurally. Local healthcare system wanted to put up a new greenfield hospital facility, was turned down for the CON by a challenge from another hospital 30 miles away. They wrenched demands out of the facility to get the CON approved with modifications that basically took away all of the “hospital” from it and basically made it “fancy block of specialist doctors” instead.

jasonlotito•21m ago

This doesn't solve the issue presented in the study. PE hospitals exists in states with and without these restrictions. So while CON might be an issue, it doesn't reconcile the issue of PE. In fact, PE priorities is exactly one of the things CON was setup to handle.

Regardless, you have to explain how removing CON solves the PE issue mentioned when states without CON had the same issues.

viscountchocula•52m ago

Certificate of Need: basically, prove to regulators that there is enough "need" before opening up new facilities.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Certificate_of_need

betaby•39m ago

In the USA/Canada number of doctors minted is caped by the cartel of doctors. That costs non-trivial money and lives lost.

Source: https://thedailyeconomy.org/article/how-congress-created-the... and many others

miltonlost•12m ago

While important, this is immaterial to the NBC article. The PE firms CUT the number of employees in ER rooms in this paper, so having more doctors wouldn't actually help out the problem that the NBC article is describing.

"The increased deaths in emergency departments at private equity-owned hospitals are most likely the result of reduced staffing levels after the acquisitions, which the study also measured, said Dr. Zirui Song, a co-author and associate professor of health care policy and medicine at Harvard Medical School."

The issue with American healthcare is the profit-seeking capitalists.

jwilber•6m ago

Well, it could be both. Having more doctors before cuts means having more after cuts.

johnisgood•37m ago

FDA drug approval processes and insurance regulations.

palmotea•33m ago

> FDA drug approval processes

What, specifically? Just abolish them all, and return to the pre-1938 status quo (e.g. marketing radium water to cure what ails ya)? Or specific reforms to make the drug approval processes more effective?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radithor

jamil7•23m ago

> (e.g. marketing radium water to cure what ails ya)?

Sounds like something the current US health secretary might actually like.

cogman10•22m ago

Best way to make the entire process more efficient would be centralizing R&D and approval and nationalizing the manufacturing of drugs. MAYBE you could license out the rights to produce drugs on 10 or 20 year license agreements.

Turn it into a pure R&D effort and not one driven by profit.

ajmurmann•13m ago

Who is gonna decide how the R&D money gets spent? What's their skin in the game and their feedback mechanism? Why will they do a better job picking what to research than current pharmaceutical companies?

cogman10•3m ago

> Who is gonna decide how the R&D money gets spent?

Same way the NHS previously funded medical research. Grants and grant review. You can expand that department and effort.

> What's their skin in the game and their feedback mechanism?

Believe it or not, some people just want to research and look into cures for diseases. Shocking I know. Feedback can be reviews of their work and blackballing bad actors that consistently kick out bad research.

> Why will they do a better job picking what to research than current pharmaceutical companies?

Because they already are. Pharmaceuticals aren't doing the majority of research, they are taking NHS funded research and running it through FDA approval.

Ozempic, for example, didn't come from pharmaceutical research, it came from grant research into lizard spit.

mothballed•20m ago

ER required to take everyone but with no answer on how they're going to be paid for.

End result is a gazillion hood rats showing up to the emergency room with an "STD" or the flu "muh 20 hour a week job that provides no health insurance needs a doctors note" and meanwhile the dying guy has to deal with the drain those people impose on resources, not all of which can be mitigated away by triage. And the actually sick people who have something they can get sued for are terrified to go because now they have to subsidize all the bad actors and they get gutted to do so, so they wait until they're about dead to show up.

hiddencost•16m ago

Hoodrats?

mothballed•16m ago

Source: worked ~1 year in an inner city ER alongside a doctor seeing every case. Yes it was the hoodrats abusing the system.

gdbsjjdn•10m ago

Huh, so if the people going to emergency for the flu had primary care doctors they wouldn't have to go to emergency? That's almost like an argument for public non-emergency clinics and universal health insurance so people can get treatment in an appropriate setting.

mothballed•8m ago

Might work. But it just goes to show, no one wants to hear the actual reasons why ER are broken, because the tone you use indicates you don't like the truth you're hearing.

cogman10•8m ago

> And the actually sick people who have something they can get sued for are terrified to go because now they have to subsidize all the bad actors and they get gutted to do so

Or maybe they are dealing with hospital staff being openly hostile to them and calling them "hood rats" and claiming they are just there with STDs and the flu?

> they have to subsidize all the bad actors

You're right, we are all subsidizing the health insurance and private medical industry.

The problem you describe "People go to the ER because they are uninsured while working" isn't a problem with people being lazy terrible people, it's a problem with the entire US healthcare which binds insurance and healthcare to employment.

You want to make the whole thing cheaper and more efficient? Then nationalize health insurance either by expanding medicare or medicaid to everyone (I prefer medicare). Then you won't see these "hood rats" using the ER for more minor medical issues because they can simply afford to go to a clinic instead.

mothballed•2m ago

>Or maybe they are dealing with hospital staff being openly hostile to them and calling them "hood rats"

I never called them that until I left health care. I know I could get fired for telling the truth.

>and claiming they are just there with STDs and the flu?

It was their own claim, usually true.

> The problem you describe "People go to the ER because they are uninsured while working" isn't a problem with people being lazy terrible people, it's a problem with the entire US healthcare which binds insurance and healthcare to employment.

I've never said it wasn't. Why are you so hostile in tone to the truth? You're like the sister comment, when you hear the real reasons why ER is broken from people that work there, it turns out all you do is get mad.

kriops•15m ago

Dishonest question. You are sealioning. Do better.

potato3732842•11m ago

That's like saying "it's ok if I shit in the river, it's a big river". When a million other people do it you've got a water quality problem.

Each and every one of these regulations can in abstract, be justified by some useful idiot looking at only the first and second order inputs and outputs and not looking at the totality of the effects.

Nobody with a brain would defend shitting in the river, but here you are asking for individual turds so that they may be justified on the basis that the individual dropping them was relieved and their individual impact on water quality was minor.

baq•14m ago

'Your appendix is my pension plan dividend'

southernplaces7•57m ago

But i'm sure shareholder value saw some much healthier returns, so it all sort of balances out nicely.

soco•47m ago

I wonder what if the shareholder happens to be in ER?

bilekas•38m ago

They will get a tax write off for their medical bills via their companies expenses ?

esseph•32m ago

Tax line item comment: "Work trip!"

jasonsb•24m ago

That's a price they're willing to pay.

MangoToupe•43m ago

There are a significant number of people in this country that will view this as the market enforcing rational healthcare (at least until it affects a loved one). I’m not sure we have the will to improve our care.

baggachipz•39m ago

> at least until it affects a loved one

This lack of empathy extends to many other areas: Drug addiction, homelessness, rights for marginalized groups, etc. So long as there is a profit motive, these things will suffer due to the selfishness of those who don't (yet) receive a benefit.

justinzollars•9m ago

Thats not how private equity works.

MangoToupe•4m ago

You're going to have to articulate yourself with particulars if you want me to understand what you're talking about. For instance, I didn't mention private equity at all, so I'm confused why you might think I was attempting to refer to them.

toast0•4m ago

Emergency room care is definitely not a rational market. Hospitals have a federal obligation to provide stabilizing care regardless of ability to pay. That's not really a market.

I wonder how this study controlled for hospital selection though. In locations with multiple hospitals available, ambulances route patients on multiple factors... Perhaps there are factors leading to these hospitals receiving patients less likely to survive.

Additionally, PE often purchases distressed companies, so the likely alternative to a PE purchase of a hospital is a closed hospital. In some cases, closing the hospital would be better, but probably not all of them.

jameslk•40m ago

Is there somewhere I can determine if a particular business is majority held by a PE firm?

mv4•23m ago

Search press releases, you fill find announcements of PE deals.

bilekas•35m ago

> Health care has been a focus of the financiers because it accounts for 18% of gross domestic product in the United States.

This seems extremely high.. Ireland with free public healthcare for example is ~6%.. I think the largest in Europe, by a lot, is Germany? ~13%.

xtracto•26m ago

The problem is that it's an inelastic market. So sellers can basically charge WHATEVER they want, constrained only to the line where people will revolt. But that's a very high line in the US.

Health providing shouldn't be a for-profit endeavor. Certainly shouldn't be in the stock market and it absolutely shouldn't be comingled with "insurance"

ajmurmann•9m ago

> The problem is that it's an inelastic market. So sellers can basically charge WHATEVER they want, constrained only to the line where people will revolt.

What keeps me from bringing my business too the competition like I do in every other market? The main constraint I see right now is that there are very few, but large hospitals and my insurance only pays for me to go to even fewer of those. However, competition already works (if the patient makes an effort) for some planned procedures like CT scans where you can safe up to 80% in my own experience.

MattGaiser•15m ago

Fun fact: Public healthcare spending in the USA is at about 7% of GDP between Medicare, Medicaid, and military healthcare. The US governments spend more on healthcare as a percentage of GDP than many countries spend giving it to everyone.

bilekas•3m ago

> The US governments spend more on healthcare as a percentage of GDP than many countries spend giving it to everyone

Is this a product of inflated prices ? Or is this research funding for example ? I'm curious what the complete definition for Healthcare spending actually is.

dragonwriter•9m ago

US healthcare expenditures are ludicrously high, because the US healthcare “system” is ludicrously inefficient by global standards.

US public healthcare expenditures are similar to what some developed countries with fully public universal healthcare have—and the private expenditures on top are more than the public costs.

People sometimes joke about the US having gaps in healthcare because of defense or other spending, but the fact is the US effectively pays vast amounts of money to create those gaps, rather than having them because of some resource constraints.

slfnflctd•4m ago

There is a lot of skimming at multiple levels. Far too many middle layers and gatekeepers, constantly haggling and looking for more ways to profit. Continuous market consolidation to fewer players looking to exploit economies of scale over decades. Perverse incentives everywhere.

There are still people trying to behave ethically within this framework, but it's hard when the framework itself is so corrupted by profit motives which should never have been there in the first place. Direct providers should be running the show, not financiers. They need to be aware of how to balance the books within reason and be paid properly, but beyond that it should be much more patient focused. We definitely don't need so many profit-taking leeches in all the places we have them now.

ajmurmann•2m ago

There are definitely things in the system that drive prices up (like lack of competition (see CON) and middle men). However, a big reason you see this high cost and difference between countries is Baumol cost disease. Productivity and salaries in the US are very high. Meanwhile healthcare, like education for example, has seen very low productivity improvements. This leads to an ever increasing price. It's unintuitive because the healthcare workers didn't get more productive. However, they could be more productive elsewhere, so comp needs to go up to stay competitive with other options available to the workers. One might argue that nurses for example still earn very little, given how hard and important their work is but that's precisely what you'd see in areas affected by Baumol. The comp only gets dragged up to keep people from quitting or striking. There is little to no competition for something like a "10x nurse" because that's not a thing and the industry struggles to keep justifying their high prices while TV prices keep dropping and dropping and cellphones keep getting more impressive.

resters•33m ago

i'd be curious about other metrics in addition to death rate...

- health adjusted quality of life metrics and the way they are impacted by various diagnoses

- healthspan metrics

- patient satisfaction

- employee satisfaction

Ultimately, capitalism is not necessarily at odds with providing efficient high qualty healthcare. But we have to decide what matters. If death rate were the only relevant metric, medicine would be practiced much differently.

RoyTyrell•22m ago

I agree, I don't think capitalism is inherently at odds with quality healthcare, and technically private equity isn't either but it certainly raises the chances. PE firms tend to be fairly parasitic with their investments - maybe that's fine for a restaurant chain but that sucks when you're dealing with lives (people or animals). I used to be in health insurance and you knew when there were nursing homes and clinics/faciltiies that were owned by PE. PE-owned nursing homes tend to have far more infractions against them, more elder abuse claims, and lower quality of life for the residents. You could say well PE buys up facilities that have room for improvement, which sometimes that's true, but in many times they seem to buy because (imo) they feel they can get by with lower regulatory enforcement so can cut costs and squeeze them. Sometimes they do buy or build higher-end senior living facilities but those are cash cows in their own way that you don't want to cut corners with.

MangoToupe•16m ago

> Ultimately, capitalism is not necessarily at odds with providing efficient high qualty healthcare.

What would the situation look like where revenue is better directed to shareholders than to care?

Zigurd•2m ago

There's a reason death rates are used to measure outcomes in things like crime prevention: it's harder to fudge reporting when there's a dead body.

Everything else you mentioned can be manipulated in bad faith, especially by a profit-motivated organization.

limagnolia•28m ago

Anyone with access to the study know how they matched patient populations at the comparison hospitals?

parpfish•24m ago

is the change in death rate because the health services got worse or because the type of patients going to that hospital have shifted?

if they slash staffing and make it hard to schedule in a reasonable amount of time, patients with low-risk issues will just skip going altogether. Or, if they have the means, go to a nicer hospital.

mv4•24m ago

Serious question: is there a single example where the customer experience has improved after private equity took over?

recov•16m ago

Not sure if I would consider this private equity, but maybe https://automattic.com/ for software?

Vosporos•12m ago

Yes, when the customer also happens to be the equity manager, so the customer coincidentally gets a big stack of cash. ;-)

Aunche•8m ago

Usually when a company sells to private equity, it is because the business is suffering from financial hardship or the current owner is unable to continue to run the business and cannot find a successor, so selling to private equity would be the least bad option.

testfrequency•19m ago

Same shit has been happening the pet care industry.

The rich don’t care about anyone but their financial advisor.

bzmrgonz•16m ago

History will be hard pressed to find a success story after private equity takes anything over. Here I was thinking I had coined a term for them, only to find out it already exists... "HYENA CAPITALISM".

nabla9•14m ago

HOSPITALS: “High-markup” hospitals are overwhelmingly for-profit, located in large metropolitan areas and have the worst patient outcomes https://www.uclahealth.org/news/release/high-markup-hospital...

>These “high-markup hospitals” (HMH), which comprised about 10% of the total the researchers examined, charged up to 17 times the true cost of care. By contrast, markups at other hospitals were an average of three times the cost of care.

>They also have significantly worse patient outcomes compared with lower-cost hospitals, new UCLA research finds.

NURSING HOMES: Owner Incentives and Performance in Healthcare: Private Equity in Nursing Homes ( https://www.nber.org/papers/w28474

>After instrumenting for the patient-nursing home match, we recover a local average treatment eﬀect on mortality of 11%. Declines in measures of patient well-being, nurse staﬃng, and compliance with care standards help to explain the mortality eﬀect.

gjgtcbkj•3m ago

I wonder if we will be allowed to share this information in the future in someone knew a love one died in for profit hospital that might provoke violence against feel market believers.

applesaucer•9m ago

fucking duh

lordleft•8m ago

The market really is the greatest mechanism for laundering morally reprehensible processes, isn't it? I find that many people struggle to find the vocabulary or concepts to denounce this kind of outcome because it occurs through market forces.

nenenejej•3m ago

Late stage capitalism?

wnevets•4m ago

It should be against the law for private equity to own hospitals.

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