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, from Rogé 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 cutting back on staffing while relying more on psychoactive medication. Stories abound of patients being rushed to the hospital after being overprescribed opioids, of bedside call buttons so poorly attended that residents suffer in silence while waiting for help, of nurses being pressured to work while sick with COVID. A 2021 study concluded that private-equity ownership was associated with about 22,500 premature nursing-home deaths from 2005 to 2017—before the wave of death and misery wrought by the pandemic.
Or, to make a long story short, they're murdering your grandmother for money. And the government is doing nothing about it.
1 comment:
Or maybe we have a mental image of how much a nursing home should cost, and we balk at how much it actually does cost.
As you constantly point out, capitalism is a good way to optimize some goods but a lousy way to optimize others. When the only tool you have is a hammer you'll try to make everything look like a nail.
Post a Comment