Comment by JumpCrisscross
1 day ago
> 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.