Thread

Bill to Ban Private Equity from Owning Medical Practices

509 points · 384 comments · paimapi

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. BLKNSLVR · 1789949336 · focus · HN ↗
  It feels to me as if the US is a useful example for the outcomes of a focus on capitalist ideals does for medical services in a country.
  Apologies if an AI summary is offensive to some, but here we go:
  > The US is a world leader in advanced and specialist medicine, but its overall system for providing affordable, accessible, equitable medical care to its citizens ranks poorly—last among the 10 comparable high-income countries in the strongest recent comparison.
  Both sources are the same site:
  <a href="https://www.commonwealthfund.org/sites/default/files/2024-09/PDF_Blumenthal_mirror_mirror_2024_Exhibits.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://www.commonwealthfund.org/sites/default/files/2024-09...
  <a href="https://www.commonwealthfund.org/publications/fund-reports/2024/sep/mirror-mirror-2024" rel="nofollow">https://www.commonwealthfund.org/publications/fund-reports/2...

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