I generally don't like to write about articles, about other articles, but in this case I'm going to make an exception for this piece by Cory Doctorow, "When Private Equity Destroys Your Hospital" because I think he strikes at the heart of the issue in a way that the original writers at The American Prospect don't, or are afraid to.
https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/28/5000-bats/
Imagine for a moment that I told you a story about an open hospital that didn't have any hospital supplies because it refused to pay for them, where medical equipment and even the Pepsi machines were being repossessed by creditors, and staff (including doctors) were working without pay because their checks keep bouncing. Furthermore, imagine I told you that this hospital literally had human excrement running from the walls, and lost an entire floor to occupation by roughly five thousand wild bats. You might be tempted to think I was talking about dystopian fiction, or a place located far outside the wealthiest nation on Earth, but of course I'm not - everything I wrote above is about an American hospital in Florida, the Rockledge Regional Medical Center.
As Doctorow notes, this real life horror story is brought to you by Steward Health, a Private Equity-backed company that currently controls 32 hospitals all over the United States. That bit about Private Equity is important, because if you want to know how a hospital can be turned into a nightmare death trap in the way Rockledge Regional has been, you're going to need to follow the money; specifically, the money being looted out of RRMC by Steward Health and its CEO Ralph de la Torre - a man once hailed as a "genius disruptor" who is now mostly famous for paying himself huge bonuses while running companies into the ground.
Given that operating a hospital like Tony's gang busts out a gambler's sporting goods store in an episode of the Sopranos shouldn't be a successful business model, you might find yourself asking "how are they going to get away with this?" This would be a good question twenty-five years ago, but today of course the answer is, complicit regulatory officials (in this case Florida Republicans), and the reality that if you just buy up *all* the hospitals and start looting them, eventually the government will have to bail you out or simply leave everyday people with no hospitals. Furthermore, as Cory so eloquently notes, this is not an aberration, but the actual business model of Private Equity firms buying up all sorts of businesses and public goods in our society while promising to "disrupt" whole industries. Far from improving services or medical care, the PE industry model of operation simply loots vital businesses like the RRMC before selling them off to even more shady PE companies that loot them again; often this process occurs multiple times as predatory capital squeezes every last ounce out of their purchases, no matter who it harms.
Should this be a crime? You bet your ass it should be, but legally speaking, it really isn't; because you live in a country that facilitates the monstrous accumulation of wealth by rich businessmen, even at the cost of everyday people's lives. You should read the entire piece, but Doctorow's money quote is worth reprinting here:
"The PE sector is a reminder that the crimes people commit for money far outstrip the crimes they commit for ideology. Even the most ideological killers are horrified by the murders their profit-motivated colleagues commit."
