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> if they’re such a great profit source that PE firms are snapping them up This is where the Econ 101 naiveté of your comment goes completely off the rails. I

> if they’re such a great profit source that PE firms are snapping them up This is where the Econ 101 naiveté of your comment goes completely off the rails. I am wondering if you are trolling. - A vet certainly does not need to be a "great" profit source for PE. I genuinely can't believe you'd say that with a straight face. If it barely breaks even and the owners end up flipping the assets and real estate, that's a win. - The obvious reason PE has stepped up their investments in pet care is that COVID led to a huge spike in US pet ownership. In about 5 years this spike in vet demand will fade. When that happens, these firms will wring their investments dry before moving on, leaving debt-saddled clinics behind. You can't just ignore the actual economic context because you found a fact-free explanation that high schoolers find convincing. - in general it might be barely profitable to run a good vet clinic, but highly profitable to run a terrible clinic. I doubt emergency vet medicine is very profitable. You can't just assume PE runs the clinics the same as a vet-owned clinic. In fact the article makes it clear that this is not the case. - There is just a total lack of humility from you: being smug and ignorant is a bad combination. Sure, the article is full of people complaining about specific PE-owned vets, and the comments on HN are full of people complaining about specific PE-owned vets.... but maybe if they understood the law of supply and demand, they wouldn't be so upset.

mattmaroon 2y ago
These are terrible arguments. PE firms aren’t running around flipping veterinarian firms for a couple hundred grand. They do that with fortune 500 companies for billions, not vet offices for tens of thousands. They’re buying them because they expect good ROI going forward. They are not dumb, your argument about Covid has surely occurred to them and been rejected for reasons that seem pretty apparent. Who is being smug now? Assuming the PEs miss the most obvious idea? It’s a garbage one though and they know it, the spike wasn’t that big, demand had been growing much faster than supply for decades and will continue to, etc. They’re buying because they can increase efficiency (I am sure by cutting patient care and other awful things at times but in some ways that are good too), because the industry will grow and consolidate, because demand will keep outstripping supply. They’re probably right. They usually are. I don’t think humility has anything to do with finding a title of an article to be sensationalized clickbait. I love it when you guys switch to personal insults because you don’t like a conflicting opinion, because you’re so bad at it. Another thing that used to happen on Reddit and not here, by the way. The signal to noise ratio here is still high enough to hang around, but the group who come to discuss ideas shrinks a little every year, while the group who likes their propaganda with a side of rage grows.
- nicklecompte 2y ago
  > PE firms aren’t running around flipping veterinarian firms for a couple hundred grand. They do that with fortune 500 companies for billions, not vet offices for tens of thousands. They’re buying them because they expect good ROI going forward. This is a dumb thing to say. My views are almost entirely informed by how PE operates in mental health, aka actual facts and not stupid mental models of actors optimizing utility functions. According to you, Blackstone apparently thought childhood autism services was a good ROI going forward, and having to sell off all the assets was just an unfortunate little boo-boo. Wouldn't want to hurt PE's feelings by suggesting they were only in it for short-term gain. https://bhbusiness.com/2022/11/11/large-autism-provider-card-shuts-down-operations-in-10-states/ https://bhbusiness.com/2022/11/11/large-autism-provider-card... Here they openly discuss the opportunities for profitable exits in mental health: https://bhbusiness.com/2022/11/15/private-equity-expected-to-increase-behavioral-health-deals-in-2023/ https://bhbusiness.com/2022/11/15/private-equity-expected-to... I don't think you are responding in good faith - it doesn't seem like you've read the article, you are just responding to the headline + your own fact-free misconceptions.
  - mattmaroon 2y ago
    The article specifically says “A large number of these funds are seeing veterinary medicine as a good profit center” which is exactly what I said and fairly obvious. You can’t tell me the article is right one minute and wrong the next. The article is very poorly written, it says they have spent billions on veterinary practices, dog food brands, and pet insurance companies. Two of these things are not like the others. You’d have to buy a whole lot of veterinary offices, like all of them, to get into the billions. It’s probably an insignificant sum relative to the others. And all of it just shows they think the pet industry is going to continue to do well. If they’re trying to flip real estate, they are going about it in a really stupid way. And you just proved my point was for the big chains rather than individual practices like what is happening in the veterinary industry. Also the second link says they are buying up mental health because of anticipated continuing long term demand, which is exactly what I said PE is doing here. I like that you argue against yourself for me. You’re worried about if I’m arguing in bad faith, you’re just arguing badly.

mattmaroon 2y ago

These are terrible arguments. PE firms aren’t running around flipping veterinarian firms for a couple hundred grand. They do that with fortune 500 companies for billions, not vet offices for tens of thousands. They’re buying them because they expect good ROI going forward. They are not dumb, your argument about Covid has surely occurred to them and been rejected for reasons that seem pretty apparent. Who is being smug now? Assuming the PEs miss the most obvious idea? It’s a garbage one though and they know it, the spike wasn’t that big, demand had been growing much faster than supply for decades and will continue to, etc. They’re buying because they can increase efficiency (I am sure by cutting patient care and other awful things at times but in some ways that are good too), because the industry will grow and consolidate, because demand will keep outstripping supply. They’re probably right. They usually are. I don’t think humility has anything to do with finding a title of an article to be sensationalized clickbait. I love it when you guys switch to personal insults because you don’t like a conflicting opinion, because you’re so bad at it. Another thing that used to happen on Reddit and not here, by the way. The signal to noise ratio here is still high enough to hang around, but the group who come to discuss ideas shrinks a little every year, while the group who likes their propaganda with a side of rage grows.

nicklecompte 2y ago
> PE firms aren’t running around flipping veterinarian firms for a couple hundred grand. They do that with fortune 500 companies for billions, not vet offices for tens of thousands. They’re buying them because they expect good ROI going forward. This is a dumb thing to say. My views are almost entirely informed by how PE operates in mental health, aka actual facts and not stupid mental models of actors optimizing utility functions. According to you, Blackstone apparently thought childhood autism services was a good ROI going forward, and having to sell off all the assets was just an unfortunate little boo-boo. Wouldn't want to hurt PE's feelings by suggesting they were only in it for short-term gain. https://bhbusiness.com/2022/11/11/large-autism-provider-card-shuts-down-operations-in-10-states/ https://bhbusiness.com/2022/11/11/large-autism-provider-card... Here they openly discuss the opportunities for profitable exits in mental health: https://bhbusiness.com/2022/11/15/private-equity-expected-to-increase-behavioral-health-deals-in-2023/ https://bhbusiness.com/2022/11/15/private-equity-expected-to... I don't think you are responding in good faith - it doesn't seem like you've read the article, you are just responding to the headline + your own fact-free misconceptions.
- mattmaroon 2y ago
  The article specifically says “A large number of these funds are seeing veterinary medicine as a good profit center” which is exactly what I said and fairly obvious. You can’t tell me the article is right one minute and wrong the next. The article is very poorly written, it says they have spent billions on veterinary practices, dog food brands, and pet insurance companies. Two of these things are not like the others. You’d have to buy a whole lot of veterinary offices, like all of them, to get into the billions. It’s probably an insignificant sum relative to the others. And all of it just shows they think the pet industry is going to continue to do well. If they’re trying to flip real estate, they are going about it in a really stupid way. And you just proved my point was for the big chains rather than individual practices like what is happening in the veterinary industry. Also the second link says they are buying up mental health because of anticipated continuing long term demand, which is exactly what I said PE is doing here. I like that you argue against yourself for me. You’re worried about if I’m arguing in bad faith, you’re just arguing badly.