Thread

1. frisco · 1789948788 · focus · HN ↗

   Medicine is extremely capex intensive and only become more so. Sucking private capital out of healthcare is going to make it vastly worse for everyone; higher prices and less innovation. I think we can criticize the often ruthlessness of PE while realizing that limiting medicine's ability to invest would be a huge self-own and only force further centralization into the biggest non-profit centers.

   Medicine is already held back enough by the lack of ability to use debt to finance its sales, unlike almost every other industry; you can repossess a car but you can't repo an implant or administered drug, forcing everything to be paid for in cash upfront. Medicine needs as much access to capital as it can get.

   1. drknownuffin · 1789949024 · focus · HN ↗

      I have no words for how completely toxic the surge of PE in healthcare has been. It's driven the degradation of care everywhere I've been. Healthcare chains have no issues with investment (see any annual reporting document to see how much money is sitting in various investments, mostly RE); smaller clinics being eaten up by PE chains is not an answer to centralization, it's just another mechanism of it.

      1. frisco · 1789949184 · focus · HN ↗

         "Private equity" also includes venture capital here. It means all private direct investment. The thing you are imagining is one small corner of what private equity actually is.

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