Isaac Buck (University of Tennessee), Patients Versus Profits, 97 Temple L. Rev. (forthcoming 2024-25):
Private equity (PE) has come to health care. With it: layoffs, cuts, and new pressures for providers, higher prices for payers, and questions from patients about quality and excessive care. PE firms, driven solely by a profit motive, take over health care entities, “lean” them down, load them with debt, and hope to extract a profit for their investors when they sell the hospital, physician group, or nursing home. Their entry into health care has been stealthy but dramatic: upwards of a third of all for-profit hospitals in the United States, and 40 percent of America’s emergency rooms, are now run by a PE company—demonstrating the complete financialization of American health care.