{"id":66527,"date":"2025-10-10T20:15:11","date_gmt":"2025-10-10T20:15:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/66527\/"},"modified":"2025-10-10T20:15:11","modified_gmt":"2025-10-10T20:15:11","slug":"private-equity-delivers-consistently-poor-health-outcomes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/66527\/","title":{"rendered":"Private Equity Delivers Consistently Poor Health Outcomes"},"content":{"rendered":"

Private equity, the scantly regulated high-risk industry best known<\/a> for burying companies in debt and liquidating them for parts, wants to manage your health care \u2014 even if it means killing you. Research shows that when private funds enter the picture, patients suffer.<\/p>\n

Here are four ways you could die at private equity\u2019s hands:<\/p>\n

A new Harvard Medical School\u00a0study<\/a> of more than one million Medicare ER visits found that patient death rates are 13 percent higher in private equity\u2013owned ERs than their counterparts, likely thanks to staffing and salary cuts.<\/p>\n

On average, private equity\u2013owned hospitals reduce hospital staffing by more than 11 percent and pay ER staffers 18 percent less than non-private equity hospitals. They also transferred patients to other hospitals more frequently and shortened their stays in intensive care units \u2014 evidence of their reduced capacity for handling \u201chigh-risk\u201d (read: very sick) patients.<\/p>\n

Corporatized dental care has\u00a0long been accused<\/a>\u00a0of being a hotbed for medical malpractice, and matters could be getting worse as private equity\u00a0sinks its talons<\/a>\u00a0into sprawling dental operations.<\/p>\n

Private equity\u2013backed dental groups have been found<\/a>\u00a0to perform medically unnecessary and painful procedures. One firm\u00a0allegedly extracted<\/a>\u00a0healthy teeth from patients to charge them for expensive dental implants, while another performed root canals on the baby teeth of children as young as three.<\/p>\n

Across\u00a0numerous<\/a>\u00a0surgical<\/a>\u00a0procedures, patients at private equity hospitals were more likely to suffer life-threatening complications and die within a month of surgery. A\u00a0study<\/a> of more than 662,000 Medicare hospitalizations in private equity\u2013owned facilities saw 25 percent more hospital-acquired complications, including falls and surgical site infections, compared to other hospitals.<\/p>\n

\u201cPrivate equity acquisition of hospitals, on average, was associated with increased hospital-acquired adverse events despite a likely lower-risk pool of admitted Medicare beneficiaries, suggesting poorer quality of inpatient care,\u201d researchers\u00a0concluded<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Pregnant women may also be at higher risk in private equity\u2013owned practices. These facilities are likely to push for C-sections because they are highly profitable<\/a>, even though the procedures have an\u00a080 percent<\/a>\u00a0higher chance of complications than natural birth.<\/p>\n

And investors\u2019 C-section market could soon be growing: In Florida, private equity backed a\u00a0recently passed law<\/a>\u00a0that allows the procedures to be performed outside the hospital.<\/p>\n

Medicare patients in private equity\u2013backed nursing homes suffered an 11 percent<\/a> higher short-term mortality rate than those in non-private equity\u2013backed facilities between 2004 and 2019, resulting in 22,500 additional deaths.<\/p>\n

Nursing homes linked to private equity\u00a0tend to underperform<\/a>\u00a0in terms of patient mobility and reported pain levels. They also tend to have fewer caregivers on staff to offer behavioral therapy, which might explain why their patients are 50 percent more likely to be prescribed antipsychotic medication.<\/p>\n

Moreover, private equity\u2019s liquidity issues (caused by debt-backed buyouts) mean that financial managers often sell nursing home properties and lease the facility back, spiking rent by an average of\u00a077 percent<\/a>\u00a0post-buyout.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Private equity, the scantly regulated high-risk industry best known for burying companies in debt and liquidating them for…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":66528,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[163,521,85,46],"class_list":["post-66527","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-healthcare","tag-health","tag-healthcare","tag-il","tag-israel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66527","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=66527"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66527\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/66528"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=66527"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=66527"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=66527"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}