AMA: Insurance industry consolidation is "unhelpful" to patients

[Winehole23]

Private equity ownership correlates strongly with patent dissatisfaction

Dr. Rishi Wadhera, an associate professor at Harvard and an author of the study, said private equity firms have strong incentives to generate rapid financial returns by cutting costs, including staffing.

“Who feels cuts in staffing the most? It’s the patients,” Wadhera said.

His study, published this week in the Journal of the American Medical Association, builds on the 2023 work of other Harvard researchers who found problems such as falls and infections at hospitals acquired by private equity firms occur at a 25% higher rate when compared to other hospitals.

“When private equity takes over a hospital, things generally get worse for patients,” Wadhera said. “There really is an urgent need for greater transparency, monitoring and regulatory oversight.”

The new study found the decline in patient experience at private equity-owned hospitals was greater than the overall decline in satisfaction during the COVID pandemic, when the health care system was under tremendous strain.

https://www.wbur.org/news/2025/01/10...usetts-steward

[Winehole23]

making patients worse to make more money is the business plan

POSIWID

And this week, the Senate Budget Committee released a bipartisan report that found “systemic issues” with private equity investment in health care, including underinvestment, understaffing and the pursuit of financial gains at the detriment of patients.


“The findings of the investigation call into question the compatibility of private equity’s profit-driven model with the essential role hospitals play in public health,” senators said.

[Winehole23]

"our investors need y'all to die faster"

Private equity investment firms have been slammed for their role in the declining healthcare quality and access, as well as the rising costs for patients, in a recently released report from the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).
Market consolidation and private equity investment can have deadly consequences in the healthcare industry, says the report, which dropped mere days before Donald Trump retook the Oval Office.

Private equity investment in nursing homes led to an 11% increase in patient deaths, according to one study cited in the report, while another study cited illuminated that insufficient compe ion in the healthcare market increases the death rate for heart attack patients.

These problems stemmed in part from “aggressive staffing cuts and hiring inadequately credentialed staff”.

One commenter in the report, a physician, said that after her practice was acquired by private equity, she “was forced to see 45 patients daily with 1 medical assistant. This was unsafe … I was routinely told by patients they called with problems and never heard back … I knew that I was going to be the one to go down when something bad happened and I left because I refused to take that fall.”

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/...ity-healthcare

[z0sa]

^ A big problem with socialized insurance is pay, though. Doctors are (or were) salary capped in the NHS in Britain, for instance. I haven't checked on it lately but it was like 1% raises or something several years back.

A mixed system with insurance and pharmaceutical companies being heavily regulated would be the best scenario for Americans. Reduce costs without affecting the labor market, cap the price of commonly used drugs, disable insurance and pharmaceutical companies from price gouging, bring back the mandate so older patients are subsidized, while allowing clients/patients to choose which insurance companies offer the best benefits for cost for their specific needs.

Would it shrink the amount of viable insurance companies? Likely, but the free market is only ing us and hard right now. There's a vast shortage of healthcare personnel of every important (read: requiring an education/board certification) type. Doctors and nurses are in critical shortage, for instance. Unregulated (or low-regulated, I should say) healthcare en ies are passing many doctor-like responsibilities to mid-level providers like PAs and NPs to help counter this, but it's not a sustainable model since those are short supply as well.

[Winehole23]

El0n/Trump are doing to the USA what PE has done to healthcare -- degrading capacity and hurting Americans

https://www.politico.com/news/2025/0...ustry-00229070

[baseline bum]

^ A big problem with socialized insurance is pay, though. Doctors are (or were) salary capped in the NHS in Britain, for instance. I haven't checked on it lately but it was like 1% raises or something several years back.

A mixed system with insurance and pharmaceutical companies being heavily regulated would be the best scenario for Americans. Reduce costs without affecting the labor market, cap the price of commonly used drugs, disable insurance and pharmaceutical companies from price gouging, bring back the mandate so older patients are subsidized, while allowing clients/patients to choose which insurance companies offer the best benefits for cost for their specific needs.

Would it shrink the amount of viable insurance companies? Likely, but the free market is only ing us and hard right now. There's a vast shortage of healthcare personnel of every important (read: requiring an education/board certification) type. Doctors and nurses are in critical shortage, for instance. Unregulated (or low-regulated, I should say) healthcare en ies are passing many doctor-like responsibilities to mid-level providers like PAs and NPs to help counter this, but it's not a sustainable model since those are short supply as well.

Doctors in the UK aren't hundred of thousands of dollars in debt like they graduate with in the hole US. The rest of the rich world has shown the US how to have affordable high quality healthcare via a national healthcare system like Bernie proposes but the US is the one rich country that has decided human life is cheap, the people. Private healthcare has ruined this country whether it's useless insurance middlemen looting our premiums then denying coverage when it's their turn to hold up their end of the bargain or private equity vultures buying up the hospitals and cutting staff to less than the minimum needed or bird pharma companies price gouging medicine and it needs to be destroyed.

[Winehole23]

PE firm takes over Utah football

University of Utah’s athletic department began the process to lay off select employees as part of its restructuring following the soon-to-be finalized deal with Otro Capital on Friday, a department spokesperson told The Salt Lake Tribune.


“In preparation for the growth of Crimson Brand Partners (CBP, formerly Utah Brand Initiatives),” an athletics department spokesperson said in a statement Friday evening, “The University has begun the process of transitioning select units of some University operations to the new company. The first step of that process requires the discontinuation of the individual positions in those units through a reduction in force (RIF), to be followed by CBP’s hiring process.”

https://www.sltrib.com/sports/utah-u...tling-layoffs/