Private equity, the scantly regulated high-risk industry best known for burying companies in debt and liquidating them for parts, wants to manage your health care — even if it means killing you. Research shows that when private funds enter the picture, patients suffer.
Here are four ways you could die at private equity’s hands:
A new Harvard Medical School study of more than one million Medicare ER visits found that patient death rates are 13 percent higher in private equity–owned ERs than their counterparts, likely thanks to staffing and salary cuts.
On average, private equity–owned 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 — evidence of their reduced capacity for handling “high-risk” (read: very sick) patients.
Corporatized dental care has long been accused of being a hotbed for medical malpractice, and matters could be getting worse as private equity sinks its talons into sprawling dental operations.
Private equity–backed dental groups have been found to perform medically unnecessary and painful procedures. One firm allegedly extracted healthy teeth from patients to charge them for expensive dental implants, while another performed root canals on the baby teeth of children as young as…
Auteur: Veronica Riccobene
