Private equity: health care's vampire

[justaprogressive]

Private equity firms are sucking the resources out of America’s hospitals and nursing homes, and feeding on doctors to generate profits. These firms — which pool funds from wealthy investors and are exempt from many of the regulations and disclosure requirements that apply to other types of investments — have spent a half-trillion dollars since 2018 buying up medical resources.

Using dollops of investors’ cash and massive loans, private equity firms have taken over hundreds of hospitals, thousands of nursing homes, and tens of thousands of medical practices, leaving the hospitals, nursing homes, and practices — not the investors — on the hook to pay off the debt.

Private equity owners often compound that financial injury by selling off the hospitals’ land and buildings, handing the proceeds to investors and saddling the hospitals with unaffordable rents for facilities they once owned. Take the 33-hospital Steward system, which originated from the private equity purchase of a Catholic hospital chain in Massachusetts in 2010 by Cerberus Capital Management. When Steward sold its properties to a trust and then leased them back in 2016, some facilities were so cash-strapped they couldn’t afford artificial valves for heart surgeries, supplies for their ER trauma center, or repairs for broken elevators.

Steward eventually spiraled down to bankruptcy; several of its hospitals that provided vital care to nearby communities for decades look set to close. But private equity investors walked away with hundreds of millions, and Steward’s CEO still sails on his $40 million superyacht.

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[Macrophylla]

1. Yep

It's making the already difficult job of healthcare even more difficult.
25 + year RN and I can't wait until I get out of the profession.
I straight up tell people interested in nursing or healthcare in general to make a different choice

[appalachiablue]

2. Healthcare Vampires and Vultures, dangerous, wrong and downright evil.