The article tries to paint a naive example where private equity buys everything and jacks up the prices. But why doesn't this happen to restaurants, or super markets or car mechanics?<p>You have to ask yourself what makes healthcare unique to nearly every other well functioning market in the US. The bigger issue is there is third party paying for things. Try to ask your doctor how much something costs and they'll stare at you like you have two heads. Imagine getting your car fixed without knowing how much it's going to cost<p>The other problem is the regulation and groups like AMA. Why don't new cardiologists enter the field? Because there is a cap of graduates that the AMA controls. Why doesn't a new hospital open up? Because there is often a "certificate of need" to open a new health care facility and other health care providers in the vicinity get to determine who is allowed in.<p>What would happen to restaurants if new waiters had to go to school for 8 years and there was a cap on how many can graduate and you need to go to a board of neighboring restaurants to decide if you can open yours, and diners are forced to sign up for some company to pay for all the meals.<p><a href="https://www.ncsl.org/health/certificate-of-need-state-laws" rel="nofollow">https://www.ncsl.org/health/certificate-of-need-state-laws</a>
The insurance industry in the USA is so screwed. A few years ago I had to go to the emergency room (turns out it was my gall bladder) and afterwards I got separate bills from the hospital, the anesthesiologist, and the mri. It was one hospital but it turns out it was 3 separate companies.<p>Of course I didn't get the bills right away. No I got them for months afterwards.<p>I got the main bill, I called up the hospital to pay and they said they would give me a discount for paying all at once. What? it didn't say that anywhere on the bill. So if I had paid it online I would have paid the full amount and not the discounted price which was a couple hundred less?<p>Another time I got a bill from the hospital and I didn't know what it was for so I called them and they said "ok. We'll resubmit it to your insurance." and I never heard about it again. If I hadn't called I would have paid a bill for over a thousand dollars.<p>I got one bill for $20 a year after. The address was in another city so I was skeptical. I went to their website and put in the account number and it said I didn't owe anything. Was it a scam? Who knows.<p>Another time I had an mri scheduled for something else and I get a call from the insurance company asking if I would be willing to reschedule to another hospital 90 minutes away because it was cheaper.<p>I can't imagine how terrible it would be if I had some serious or long term illness. Imagine if any other industry was this sloppy and confusing in their billing.
The whole system is rife with widespread, unreportable fraud. I’m on hour 8 of trying to get a 46 dollar charge for my annual preventative bloodwork reversed since its literally the only benefit of my plan that should be covered, but because the mysterious incantation of CPT and diagnostic codes are wrong, my previous provider is still sending me a bill once a month.
I am a big fan of direct primary care doctors now, these are doctors that don't accept insurance. As a family of 3 we pay $200 a month to have unlimited access (person, phone, text, email) to our doctor. We pair this with a high deductible plan from work and it works out really well. It might not be the answer for everyone but it makes sense at the primary care level. As I have gotten slightly older I have appreciated having continuity of care (not One Medical) and also not have strict timelimits to discuss my health. When I see the specialist I am fine with it, give me my allotted time, I probably only have a very specific need to discuss.
PE bought up the local chain of doctor's offices a few years ago in my area, and it was an instant drop in quality. They started dropping patients for missed appointments a decade prior when they were a minor (one was being treated for depression after a suicide attempt). Then their doctors started leaving and they had to bring in people to fill the labor gap, but these pepple were not of high quality and malpractice suits became more common. Then they had to start dropping patients. Entire families suddenly had no primary care doctor, and what's worse is that this was the major providor for medical care in the area. Some people are now driving ~100 miles or more <i>each way</i> to get a primary care physician.<p>Outside of medicine, I've seen PE fuck up at least three decent tool companies. Their products are basically garbage now. PE sucks, too many glaring examples of it messing things up in my day to day.
Dr. Glaucomflecken on YouTube has a funny but informative series of shorts on private equity and their effect on hospitals and the medical system. In case you have people in your life with short attention spans but who still need to hear it.<p><a href="https://youtu.be/R5C4v22y3C0" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/R5C4v22y3C0</a>
Can we take a moment to appreciate the fact that PE is such a problem for our society, that even the publication which suggested people adjust to stagnant wages by not eating breakfast makes a deep dive on how finance bros are screwing the healthcare system?
And in the UK for your large vet bill: <a href="https://archive.ph/bTwcD" rel="nofollow">https://archive.ph/bTwcD</a> <a href="https://archive.ph/Dk0dn" rel="nofollow">https://archive.ph/Dk0dn</a>
I’m generally a free marketer, but have you ever gone to a private equity dentist’s office. They clearly recommend way more procedures than make sense compared to other dentists.
Medical schools need to be running their own finance/biz programmes coming up with their own models of how to run health care.<p>The current system outsources this thinking to b-schools and has become to dependent on unsustainable financial engineering dogma that flows out of there.
Nah, skip the article and just look at reality:<p><a href="https://www.opensecrets.org/federal-lobbying/top-spenders?cycle=a" rel="nofollow">https://www.opensecrets.org/federal-lobbying/top-spenders?cy...</a><p>Its bribery:<p>Hospitals, your local physician, pharma, and insurance companies.<p>We should begin fighting these Stronger powers. We can resent people in these professions, demand justice for decades of exploitation, etc...<p>"Universal Healthcare" isnt stopping corruption. Its codifying it.
Capitalism is the problem. We couldn’t fix inequality and corruption in 100 years. There’s no country on earth where we could say capitalism works. Total failure in every country. Capitalism is a dead end and it’s getting worse with time. Why nobody talks about that? Isn’t it a problem of all problems?
Now, why there is no replacement system of society and economics? We have institutions for physics, biology, construction, logistics and other sciences. And all of them make discoveries and move science forward. Except for one.
Why nobody is working on a replacement society and economics system? Why only this specific science is in standstill? starts to look like a conspiracy, or does capitalism cause it?
Article is paywalled but the healthcare system is death by a thousand cuts, there's no one boogeyman to blame, it's a very classic tragedy of the commons. Anyone claiming they've found the root cause of the broken healthcare system is selling you a bill of goods.
Paywalled. But the title is provocative in pointing a finger at private equity. The US healthcare system is a textbook example of thoughtless regulations that create needless bottlenecks and localised monopolies.<p>When private equity does something destructive it is remarkably like a maggot infestation - usually don't happen in well functioning systems.
You can thank the government for all the regulations which make it ultra hard for new companies to enter the market. You can thank the government for not fighting monopolies. Don’t blame the free market as it basically doesn’t exist.