[Plura-list] Private equity health-care monopolies are on a profitable killing spree

Cory Doctorow doctorow at craphound.com
Thu Nov 17 04:40:17 EST 2022


Read today's issue online at: https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/17/the-doctor-will-fleece-you-now/

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Hey DC! There's gonna be a *very special* invite-only book party for "Chokepoint Capitalism" tonight (Nov 17); it's going to be a gathering of a lot of DC trustbuster types and while it's not *technically* a public event, there are a limited number of free spaces that the organizers have asked me to distribute on a first come/first serve basis. If you'd like to come and you're free on the night of the 17th, please let me know (reply to this email) and I'll get you an invite!

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Today (Nov 17), I'm doing a webinar for Library Futures:
https://us06web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_Q6p4qpFVRi6BFLsawaCgdA

Tomorrow (Nov 18), I'm in Baltimore at the Peale Museum:
https://www.thepeale.org/event/book-talk-chokepoint-capitalism/

Fri (Nov 19), I'm at Sky Live in London:
https://news.sky.com/bigideaslive

Tue (Nov 22), I'm hosting a California Book Club event with Kim Stanley Robinson:
https://www.altaonline.com/california-book-club/a40882308/kim-stanley-robinson-the-gold-coast-california-book-club-november-selection/

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Today's links

* Private equity health-care monopolies are on a profitable killing spree: And you thought it was bad before.

* Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.

* This day in history: 2002, 2007, 2012, 2017, 2021

* Colophon: Recent publications, upcoming/recent appearances, current writing projects, current reading

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💅🏼 Private equity health-care monopolies are on a profitable killing spree

It's not just you. US healthcare, already a bureaucratic nightmare of buck-passing and price-gouging, has gotten *far* worse. Private equity firms have created regional health-care monopolies that don't just rip patients off - they're *killing* us.

Private equity is a scam. Fund managers raise gigantic sums by claiming to be able to "beat the market." In reality, they do worse for their investors than a boring old index fund:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/02/25/pluralistic-your-daily-link-dose-25-feb-2020/#extraordinaryclaims

The fund managers don't have to beat the market in order to make bank. They can take advantage of the "carried interest" loophole, which has nothing to do with interest rates - it's a tax system that was invented for 16th century sea-captains (no, really):

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/29/writers-must-be-paid/#carried-interest

PE dresses up its playbook in all kinds of bullshit, but it's a smokescreen. At core, PE funds buy companies, merge them to monopoly, slash wages, fire staff, load up their businesses with debt, and then skedaddle before the businesses collapse. They call this "creating value":

https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/24/software-is-cake-too/#looters

This playbook guarantees that everything PE touches will turn to shit. PE is a parasite that preys on weak industries and makes them even more dysfunctional. Think of how PE has cornered regional rental housing markets and then turned every rental in town into a slum:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/08/wall-street-landlords/#the-new-slumlords

Most of us didn't really think about rail-freight until last winter, when the whole system nearly collapsed. Again, the bloody handprints of PE are all over that crisis:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/04/up-your-nose/#rail-barons

The pandemic put a lot of businesses into a precarious state, and PE swooped in, buying up distressed businesses at scale and putting them into a death-spiral:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/30/medtronic-stole-your-ventilator/#blackstone-kkr

This acquisition was fueled by Trump's corporate covid bailout and the trillions in public money that the GOP made available to corporate borrowers (remember, PE thrives on debt):

https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/17/divi-recaps/#graebers-ghost

Of all the sick industries in America, healthcare is the sickest, and it's the domain where PE has done the most damage. PE stripped healthcare systems to the bone, removing all excess capacity and exhausting and demoralizing healthcare workers:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/21/profitable-butchers/#looted

They bought up emergency rooms, turned them into scam factories that hit every unfortunate person who stepped foot in them with thousands in "surprise billing" fees. Then they cut doctors' pay and spent millions on ads to block anti-surprise billing legislation:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/21/all-in-it-together/#doctor-patient-unity

The ER scam was and is wild. Some hospitals lock all their doors except for the ER doors, and then they'd hit you for "emergency care" when you went through the ER on your way to receiving normal, non-emergency procedures:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/03/14/unhealthy-finances/#steins-law

The damage wasn't limited to emergency rooms. Whole hospitals - whole hospital *systems* - were crashed by PE looters, and many of these got emergency government bailouts, because...free market?

https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/01/the-years-of-repair/#mass-murder

PE has bought its way into every corner of the health-care system, and made every bad thing, much, much worse. You know how "bad nursing home" are three of the scariest words in the English language? Try on "bad private equity owned nursing home" for size. The death toll is *massive*:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/23/acceptable-losses/#disposable-olds

Biden's SEC chair Gary Gensler has made the most decisive anti-PE moves in decades, requiring disclosures that will help investors (especially union pension funds) pierce the veil of bullshit that brings in the billions that PE fashions into weapons of financial mass destruction:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/10/monopoly-begets-monopoly/#gary-gensler

But the wheels of justice grind slow, and PE has trillions to fuel its race to suck every bit of value out of the health-care system before the party comes to an end.

In "Sick Profit: Investigating Private Equity’s Stealthy Takeover of Health Care Across Cities and Specialties," *Kaiser Health News*'s Fred Schulte reveals the plan of attack:

https://khn.org/news/article/private-equity-takeover-health-care-cities-specialties/

In 2021, PE firms bought 1,400 health care companies, spending $206b (the total since 2012 is more than $1t). They've cornered regional markets for eye care, dental care, family practices, hospices, and pet care. We've had a year to see how that played out, and it's not pretty.

Since 2014, PE companies have paid out $500m in fines for falsifying health care billings to the US government, but a fine is a price, and the fines have been absorbed into PE's business plans as part of the cost of operations.

Once a PE firm buys up all the specialists in a region, things get very bad. Take San Antonio, where nearly all the gastroenterology clinics have been bought up by PE firms, and where routine colonoscopies now cost patients thousands more than they paid before:

https://khn.org/news/article/private-equity-gastroenterologist-colonoscopy/

While there are plenty of illegal ways that PE companies extract value from their acquisitions, the legal tactics are pretty ugly all on their own, like cutting staff and replacing them with less skilled, less trained, cheaper workers, putting patients at risk.

This is particularly worrying when you consider how heavily PE companies invest in practices that treat people who are vulnerable and struggle to advocate for themselves, such as behavioral health specialists who treat autism, addiction and mental illness.

Whether or not you can escape PE depends a lot on where you live. PE only owns 12% of the nation's anesthesiology practices, but those practices are concentrated in five states, where more than two thirds of anesthesiologists are PE owned.

When PE takes over your health care, billings go way up. The average PE-treated patient generates $71 more per claim, and is 9% more likely to experience "lengthy, more costly" care:

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama-health-forum/fullarticle/2795946

Doctors who sell their practices to PE companies are lured in with promises of administrative relief from experts who'll handle billing, scheduling and compliance. But PE firms exercise fine-grained control over these doctors, violating rules that say medical practices must be run by MDs.

Take National Spine, a PE-backed chain owned by Sentinel Capital Partners that bought up  40+ pain-management clinics across the country. Doctors saw their caseload explode from 16 patients/day to 25. Medicare billings also exploded, with "unnecessary and often worthless" back braces being charged at up to $1,100 each. Patients were given $1,800 "medically unnecessary and often worthless" urine tests. National settled these claims for $3.3m in April 2019, without admitting guilt.

RLH Equity Partners's pharmacies bilked the military health insurer Tricare out of $68m through a system of kickbacks and telemarketer sales. RLH settled the case for $21m and blamed it on a few corrupt "individuals."

Most of the time, fraud claims are settled by the companies that the PE funds owe, while the PE funds themselves get off scot-free. That leaves the funds free to re-offend, and to further push the limits on patient endangerment.

One of the grisliest parts of this tale is in the realm of children's dentistry. PE firms have bought up these practices and turned them into high-volume Medicare-fraud assembly lines that perform rushed, unnecessary major procedures on poor kids and bill the government a fortune for them.

These include baby root canals and crowns, and the PE-backed dental chains set quotas for their staff, requiring them to perform a certain number of major procedures on each patient. One particularly horrifying case recounted by the KHN article is that of two-year old Zion Gastelum, who died following major dental surgery.

Gastelum received six root canals and crowns on his baby teeth at a PE-owned Kool Smiles clinic in Yuma, AZ. The oxygen bottle used during his surgery "was empty or not operating properly" and the staff who oversaw the procedure were undertrained and didn't notice. He never regained consciousness, and died of brain injuries days later.

Kool Smiles's owners paid $24m to settle a DoJ overbilling claim less than a month later. The settlement alleged that Kool Smiles performed unnecessary procedures, including baby root canals. Kool Smiles denied that they were responsible for Gastelum's death.

More than 90% of PE acquisitions fall below the $101m threshold for antitrust review, so they fly under the radar. Once the mergers are complete, they are very hard to unwind. The FTC is working its way through hundreds of comments from doctors or other health care workers asking for tighter scrutiny of health-care mergers.

The Healthcare Private Equity Association boasts that its members are poised to spend more than $3t to create "the future of healthcare."

https://hcpea.org/#!event-list


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💅🏼 Hey look at this

* Libraries Are Launching Their Own Local Music Streaming Platforms https://www.vice.com/en/article/5d34px/libraries-are-launching-their-own-local-music-streaming-platforms (h/t Slashdot)

* Fantastic Medieval Campaigns https://traversefantasy.itch.io/fmc (h/t Vintage RPG)

* Locus Magazine is delighted to announce our first annual crowdfunding campaign! https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/locus-magazine-science-fiction-fantasy-horror

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💅🏼 This day in history

#20yrsago Visa claims to own dictionary definition of “visa” https://web.archive.org/web/20021118111338/https://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,56432,00.html

#20yrsago Hacker R0TC https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2002-nov-17-tm-cyber46-story.html

#15yrsago Korea’s Internet “addiction” boot-camps https://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/18/technology/18rehab.html

#15yrsago House keeps AT&T on the hook for spying on America, Senate next? https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2007/11/senate-judiciary-committee-passes-surveillance-bill-without-telecom-amnesty

#15yrsago Infringement Nation: we are all mega-crooks https://web.archive.org/web/20071127010626/http://www.turnergreen.com/publications/Tehranian_Infringement_Nation.pdf

#10yrsago Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore: The perfect nerdish fantasy https://memex.craphound.com/2012/11/16/mr-penumbras-24-hour-bookstore-the-perfect-nerdish-fantasy/

#10yrsago What do we do about untrustworthy Certificate Authorities? https://www.nature.com/articles/491325a.pdf

#10yrsago Taliban uses CC instead of BCC, exposes identity of 400+ contacts https://observer.com/2012/11/taliban-accidentally-publicly-ccs-its-entire-mailing-list/

#10yrsago House Republicans release watershed copyright reform paper https://www.techdirt.com/2012/11/16/house-republicans-copyright-law-destroys-markets-its-time-real-reform/

#5yrsago Outstanding rant about the surreal design ethos of The Cheesecake Factory https://twitter.com/MaxKriegerVG/status/931373170791198720

#5yrsago Poor Detroit neighborhoods, abandoned by telcos and the FCC, are rolling out homebrew, community mesh broadband https://www.vice.com/en/article/kz3xyz/detroit-mesh-network

#5yrsago 70% of poor people on broadband subsidy will lose their connections thanks to Trump’s FCC https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/11/sorry-poor-people-the-fcc-is-coming-after-your-broadband-plans/

#5yrsago The 0.2% of Americans exempted by the GOP estate-tax plan (including the Trump cabinet) have never paid tax on their millions and never will https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/16/business/economy/estate-tax.html

#5yrsago Donald Trump will re-legalize importing endangered elephants’ ivory and severed heads https://www.newscientist.com/article/2153684-trump-to-let-americans-import-ivory-and-hunting-trophies-again/

#5yrsago Navy admits its pilot sky-wrote a giant cloud-wiener https://www.krem.com/article/news/local/okanogan-county/graphic-navy-admits-to-being-involved-in-obscene-skydrawings-spotted-in-okanogan-co/293-492496113

#5yrsago Pentagon mass surveillance slurped up the world’s social media traffic; then they dumped it on a publicly accessible Amazon cloud server https://www.upguard.com/breaches/cloud-leak-centcom

#5yrsago Web analytics companies offer “replay sessions” that let corporations watch every click and keystroke for individual users https://www.wired.com/story/the-dark-side-of-replay-sessions-that-record-your-every-move-online/

#5yrsago Trump’s top economic advisor asks CEOs to raise hands if they’re going to use tax cuts to invest, boggled by no one raising hands https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/11/14/why-arent-the-other-hands-up-a-top-trump-advisers-startling-response-to-ceos-not-doing-what-hed-expect/

#5yrsago Study finds that people vote for strongman “dominance” leaders when they they feel out of control of their lives https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/explaining-the-global-rise-of-ldquo-dominance-rdquo-leadership/

#5yrsago Hackers can freeze the camera that lets you know whether your “Amazon Key” equipped door is locked and who is using it https://www.wired.com/story/amazon-key-flaw-let-deliverymen-disable-your-camera/

#5yrsago The Internet of Shit is so manifestly insecure that people are staying away from it in droves https://www2.deloitte.com/content/dam/Deloitte/us/Documents/technology-media-telecommunications/us-tmt-2017-global-mobile-consumer-survey-executive-summary.pdf

#5yrsago “Economic murder”: Senior UK public health researchers say 120,000 people died under Tory austerity https://www.independent.co.uk/news/health/tory-austerity-deaths-study-report-people-die-social-care-government-policy-a8057306.html

#1yrago What Police Get When They Get Your Phone https://pluralistic.net/2021/11/16/cop-tech/#antidystopianism

#1yrago Live Nation is to blame for the Astroworld deaths https://pluralistic.net/2021/11/17/do-well-do-good-do-nothing/#crushing

#1yrago Aspiration's comprehensively deceptive greenwashing https://pluralistic.net/2021/11/17/do-well-do-good-do-nothing/#greenwashing

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💅🏼 Colophon

Today's top sources: Naked Capitalism (https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/).

Currently writing:

* The Bezzle, a Martin Hench noir thriller novel about the prison-tech industry. Yesterday's progress: 506 words (62595 words total)

* Picks and Shovels, a Martin Hench noir thriller about the heroic era of the PC. (92849 words total) - ON PAUSE

* A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

* The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation, a nonfiction book about interoperability for Verso. FIRST DRAFT COMPLETE, WAITING FOR EDITORIAL REVIEW

* Vigilant, Little Brother short story about remote invigilation. FIRST DRAFT COMPLETE, WAITING FOR EXPERT REVIEW

* Moral Hazard, a short story for MIT Tech Review's 12 Tomorrows. FIRST DRAFT COMPLETE, ACCEPTED FOR PUBLICATION

* Spill, a Little Brother short story about pipeline protests. FINAL DRAFT COMPLETE

* A post-GND utopian novel, "The Lost Cause."  FINISHED

* A cyberpunk noir thriller novel, "Red Team Blues."  FINISHED

Currently reading: Analogia by George Dyson.

Latest podcast: Sound Money https://craphound.com/news/2022/09/11/sound-money/

Upcoming appearances:

* Library Futures Webinar, Nov 17
https://us06web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_Q6p4qpFVRi6BFLsawaCgdA

* Chokepoint Capitalism at the Peale Museum (Baltimore), Nov 18:
https://www.thepeale.org/event/book-talk-chokepoint-capitalism/

* Big Ideas Live (London), Nov 19
https://news.sky.com/bigideaslive

* Kim Stanley Robinson's Gold Coast (California Book Club), Nov 22
https://www.altaonline.com/california-book-club/a40882308/kim-stanley-robinson-the-gold-coast-california-book-club-november-selection/

* Conversation with Tim Wu, Informed/Knight Foundation (Miami), Nov 30:
https://informed22.interkinnect.com/

* Australian Digital Alliance Copyright Forum (Canberra), Feb 17:
https://digital.org.au/2022/11/08/doctorow-giblin-first-speaker-announcement-ada-forum-2023/

Recent appearances:

* Team Human interview
https://www.teamhuman.fm/episodes/229-cory-doctorow

* Pitchfork Economics
https://pitchforkeconomics.com/episode/chokepoint-capitalism-with-cory-doctorow-and-rebecca-giblin/

* How big tech traps consumers and shafts creators (Irish Times)
https://shows.acast.com/inside-politics-2/episodes/how-big-tech-traps-consumers-and-shafts-creators

Latest books:

* "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com

* "Attack Surface": The third Little Brother novel, a standalone technothriller for adults. The *Washington Post* called it "a political cyberthriller, vigorous, bold and savvy about the limits of revolution and resistance." Order signed, personalized copies from Dark Delicacies https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1840/Available_Now%3A_Attack_Surface.html

* "How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism": an anti-monopoly pamphlet analyzing the true harms of surveillance capitalism and proposing a solution. https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59 (print edition: https://bookshop.org/books/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism/9781736205907) (signed copies: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2024/Available_Now%3A__How_to_Destroy_Surveillance_Capitalism.html)

* "Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a new introduction by Edward Snowden: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250774583; personalized/signed copies here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1750/July%3A__Little_Brother_%26_Homeland.html

* "Poesy the Monster Slayer" a picture book about monsters, bedtime, gender, and kicking ass. Order here: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627. Get a personalized, signed copy here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2682/Corey_Doctorow%3A_Poesy_the_Monster_Slayer_HB.html#/.

Upcoming books:

* Red Team Blues: "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books, April 2023

This work licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

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