Capitalist pigs

I ' ve had a few things to say now and again about the incompatibility of the pursuit of profit with medicine. The corporatization and commodification of health care has been bad for people biologically, emotionally, and financially. There ' s a lot to unpack about that, but one of the most egregious problems is so-called private equity, that is companies that are not publicly traded, do not have to make substantive financial disclosures, and generally operate by buying up existing companies, squeezing profit out of them by cutting costs, and then selling them, usually as husks of their former selves. Here ' s one of innumerable ugly parts of this story, fromRog é Karma in The Atlantic. I ' ll just excerpt the most relevant piece:Meanwhile, private equity has matured into a multitrillion-dollar industry, devoted to making short-term profits from highly leveraged transactions, operating with almost no regulatory or public scrutiny. Not all private-equity deals end in calamity, of course, and not all public companies are paragons of civic virtue. But the secrecy in which private-equity firms operate emboldens them to act more recklessly —and makes it much harder to hold them accountable when they do. Private-equity investment in nursing homes, to take just one example,has grown from about $5 billion at the turn of the century to more than $100 billion today. The results have not been pretty. The industry seems to have recognized that it could improve profit margins by cuttin...
Source: Stayin' Alive - Category: American Health Source Type: blogs