Comment by lukev
20 hours ago
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.
> that is virtually impossible in the current political climate
We probably need a Constitutional amendment codifying independent agencies before it can happen. We don’t need the President denying protesters medical treatment because he needs to distract from his pediphilia.
My red state rural county setup our own ambulance district. We now get much better service than before.
Hell yeah! Some things are meant to be infrastructure. Now do fiber-to-the-premises!
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.
> you can result in them then needing to sell, for much less than they'd like most likely
I’m imagining harder. Forced divestiture. Good amount of the hospitals and nursing homes would be bought of out bankruptcy.
But they still need to be bought and funded. And I think nobody wants to have a conversation about how much that costs and who winds up paying for it, particularly with many of PE’s hospitals being in rural America.