Posted by paimapi 1 day ago
Then, they buy up air ambulance services to unnecessarily fly patients to other hospitals they own because it's more profitable at the expense of care delays and worse outcomes. Meanwhile, patients and their families are stuck with exorbitant air ambulance bills $20k-60k.
Like banks, failure of a healthcare institution can be destructive for its customers and the community. If a bank goes under, especially a significant one for the community, regulators see that it's acquired by a surviving institution - often with only a weekend of downtime.
The usual complaint is going full extractive mode, desperately squeezing profit and selling inside 3-7 years.
So, yeah, we can keep private investment. But they're fucking stuck with it, trying to maintain a healthy business for 20 years.
The PE buy-up of these core local businesses isn't great for society generally, service delivery and the existence of a middle class.
The other thing I feel gov should do is force a separation of distributors and point of sale, with rules that allow smaller business to buy at the same pricing as larger.
People seem to forget a key requirement of capitalism is for government to create a level playing field for business. I cant see a better way to do this, and I suspect it would be very beneficial to the bulk of society if gov made some changes down this line.
That's only one part of economies of scale. The technical and legal compliance costs for running a provider organization are also killing small practices. And provider organizations also consolidate in order to gain power for negotiating rates with commercial insurers.
Private Equity can afford to have people sitting around all day figuring out tricks and optimizations to save a buck here and there, and this is a power imbalance because the plebs care about things like spending time with their family, and they don't spend all their time trying to save a buck.
Maybe one day the AIs will optimize for us while we spend time with our families. And if a new vet opens that costs $15 less, the AI will route customers to the new business, driving prices down, until we reach 0 profit margin across all industries.
There's probably like a 10 trillion dollar incentive to not allow AI to truly work on behalf of individuals though, so we'll see what happens. For instance, just look at the ad industry alone; if AIs are shopping truly on behalf of individuals, and this becomes wide spread, then the ad industry is just gone.
Vets see animals, not humans.