Comment by JumpCrisscross
21 hours ago
> why do we continue to allow them to operate Healthcare facilities?
We don’t want to pay for them. When private equity is forced to sell, someone has to buy or the providers get shuttered.
On the other hand, we’re clearly willing to blow the money and deficit on stupid stuff. But only if it goes boom, apparently.
Who do you mean by "we", here?
The only possible entities who could buy a company are either a bigger company, or private equity.
That the leavings of a PE business are unattractive to either of them is not a surprise.
That has nothing to do with what society at large (a better definition of "we") actually wants or needs.
> The only possible entities who could buy a company are either a bigger company, or private equity.
The American mind virus at work.
My (non-US) state government literally purchased a private hospital late last year. Now it’s public.
Keep telling yourself that corporations are going to save you. Maybe it’ll happen eventually.
Oh, trust me, I would absolutely love for a lot more of the US to be socialized (certainly healthcare, housing, and transportation.)
Unfortunately that is virtually impossible in the current political climate, so I didn't include it.
What I was trying to say is that, as it stands, PE is the end of an entity's life. Once it's been strip-mined for all value, of course nobody wants it.
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My red state rural county setup our own ambulance district. We now get much better service than before.
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The government-owned things still suck too, they just give sweetheart contracts to whoever greases the right palms even though they suck. The money still flows to bad people, no matter what. Having it be tax money in the first place just increases the possible money available to be stolen, since government budgets can in practice only go up, plus the feds can print money.
You have a good point but you squander it with condescension and sarcasm.
They could be owned by Physicians or by the Local Government. But the US has practically banned the first one
https://www.cms.gov/medicare/regulations-guidance/physician-...
> Who do you mean by "we", here?
Voters, broadly and monolithically.
> only possible entities who could buy a company are either a bigger company, or private equity
Communities. Forcing PE to divest from healthcare would require setting up a lending facility communities can borrow from to buy back their healthcare infrastructure. (Or have the government just buy it outright.)
I guess you could make it work as a window-dressing bill. Force PE to divest. Leave unsaid that you’re letting billionaires and family offices buy it up to continue the same shit. But actually solving the problem means ponying up cash to buy this stuff back. Even if it’s out of bankruptcy. (I’m not even touching the politics of paying PE and its lenders with public money.)
If you change rules to make the PE business model unprofitable, since it's in many ways toxic to society, you can result in them then needing to sell, for much less than they'd like most likely, or adapt and become less toxic.
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> We don’t want to pay for them.
Perhaps we should have kept taxing the rich the we did during WW2 and the few decades following it? No, clearly that would never work!
> we should have kept taxing the rich the we did during WW2 and the few decades following it?
Genuine question: source for any of the rich having paid more in the 50s than they did in the 90s? My understanding is that while published rates were high, effective rates were roughly flat until the Bush and Trump tax cuts.
genuine answer that it's really easy to look this up. start with a search on "Roosevelt".
https://taxpolicycenter.org/sites/default/files/statistics/p...
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>> > why do we continue to allow them to operate Healthcare facilities?
We don’t want to pay for them. When private equity is forced to sell, someone has to buy or the providers get shuttered.
Sell? The point is that PE should never have purchased these things in the first place.
> The point is that PE should never have purchased these things in the first place
You can change the present. Not the past. Private equity owns these things. If you want them to not own it, you have to buy it back. Even if out of bankruptcy. Even if via eminent domain. Then you have to run it. All of that costs money.
You're missing the point. It's too late to unwind those transactions.
In theory state or federal governments could seize ownership of those healthcare provider organizations. But then legally the government would be forced to compensate the current owners at fair market value.