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- Hacker News
- They'll still manage to figure out some loophole to do it anyway. PE really is cancer to most industries.by djfobbz
- I did a small research project based on medical billing challenge data (https://medgis.te0.io/). I tried to correlate the data to PE firms (best effort). As far as I could tell they were just a volume player but not the worst. After talking to people in the industry, theres some real sleezy doctors out there. Some do appointments at hospitals even if not required so they can charge more. There’s more anecdotes. All the incentives are messed up and I’m not sure how to fix without policy changes.by nargella
- My main problem with PE is that it is being invested in by things that I do not consider "investors" like retirement funds, teacher's pensions, annuities, etc. Many of these things have sort of implicit guarantees from the State or Federal government. These organizations should be completely banned from investing in PE. PE investments should only be invested in by "investors", and investors understand that their investment may go to zero.
- Remember that when private equity buys out a business, there is at least one major winner in that moment: the current owners who have been building up that business over years.
One foreseeable consequence of this bill is that it reduces the ultimate value of starting and building your own practice, leading to more consolidation among existing large operators. As this is foreseeable, I also imagine that it's an unstated goal.
by Nifty3929 - Can someone steelman private equity, please? I'm honestly looking for the upsides (for non-investors) of when PE moves into an industry like medicine and begins buying up businesses that traditionally aren't already large chains.
I already hear the downsides frequently from someone whose work is directly affected.
by NegativeK - Australia is on its way down this path after Brookfield / Healthscope was holding a private hospital hostage against the government and had performance so degraded a child died. Hopefully we (aus) continue down this path of burning off the rot.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-03-27/nsw-government-joes-l...
by elliotto - It's actually worse with veterinary practices.
Younger veterinarians are drowning in school debt and can't buy the practices from the older folks that are retiring. So, private equity is basically snatching all of them up right now, betting that childless millennials are going to pay tons of money on veterinary care when their pandemic pups begin to reach end-of-life.
They're going to cut wages for all the staff, and hike all the prices, because unlike with human medical care, there's hardly any regulation (yet).
- There's a pattern to the kinds of companies PE buys and I think it points to the real problem.
They like companies with some kind of moat that makes it hard to unseat them. Basically, companies where there is no alternative for the consumer. That way, they can inflict abuse but know there will be nowhere to run.
There are two different ways to achieve this. Monopoly and regulation. Hospitals have both government granted locational monopoly and tons of regulations that make it impossible to compete.
Private equity is the symptom, not the disease.
Until we get at the disease, new monsters will be born with different name filling the same ecological niche. It's economic natural selection played out in the environment we created.