Health care became more hazardous for patients at hospitals purchased by private equity firms, a new study shows.
The sweeping study, which was published Tuesday in the journal JAMA, looked at the rates of 10 serious adverse events associated with medical care at 51 hospitals before and after they were purchased by private equity firms — a financing model designed to make money for investors. The researchers then compared those results with the rates of the same complications at 259 hospitals that were not owned by private equity firms.
Private equity firms have been acquiring large chunks of the US health care delivery system in recent years. In addition to hospitals, those acquisitions include nursing homes, behavioral health systems, and private physician practices. Academic research has shown that private equity ownership is associated with higher death rates for patients in nursing homes and increased costs to taxpayers. Earlier this month, the Senate Budget Committee announced its bipartisan investigation of the impact of private equity purchases on health care facilities.
All told, researchers analyzed the outcomes of nearly 5 million hospitalizations, which were available through Medicare claims data. Researchers had at least three years of data on each hospital included in the analysis.
For profit healthcare should be illegal, profiting off of human suffering is barbaric.
Give it 30-50 years, much like tobacco, nothing will get discussed until their sales are hurting.
The true downside is large portion of the populace will always defend the behavior, conditioned to believe they deserve to be exploited and hate themselves.
Their sales will never be hurting: Healthcare is an inelastic demand.
Health insurance lobbyists will just get the politicians to parrot that Medicare for All is Socialist and/or Communist, and Death Panel fear mongering and people will eat that shit up in a heartbeat.
what a shock. I’m really shocked. that’s so unexpected, it’s shocking. it’s so shocking, i lost my socks just by reading the title. imagine what happened reading the excerpt. I can’t believe that beastly greed could harm people.
All I can think to say is “no shit”. The unrestrained lust for as much money as possible does not mix with the long term good of healthcare.
Do private equity firms make anything better? I feel like I’ve never heard of a good result coming from them in any market (assuming we’re talking about the general public and not whichever investors/executives are reaping the profits).
Another in a long series of excellent journalism by reporting the obvious results of idiocy and greed as it has been confirmed by horrible experience.
Great work corporate news. You’re making the world a place.
Being able to point to data helps win over akeptics
We’re well past the point of any of the remaining “skeptics” being actually capable of reason
There are few uninformed skeptics. How can you inform someone who doesn’t even believe in tautological concepts like, “someone pocketing profit will increase the price vs someone not pocketing profit.”?
They do not believe in basic logic. They only believe dogma.
Well, i consider myself a skeptic. for instance I like to see data validating my assumptions because I know I am capable of being wrong. There are tons of things in life that are counterintuitive.
My point is that the “skeptics” who are going to be skeptical on whether a for-profit system costs more or not are only going to be people who have failed to observe reality. They aren’t actual skeptics. They’re idiots using motivated reasoning to defend capitalism.
It’s the same morons that think the postal service must survive on its own income. That’s stupid. It’s a service. It’s a thing we all decided long ago was so nice to have that we should nationalize and subsidize it. It could be a 100% expendature and still be justified, just like the military.
It’s literally insane what people believe about capitalism, let alone the “skeptics”.
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