3 ms·

In the US you can blame private equity for that. Buying up practices and pushing them to turn a profit by maximizing patient load and minimizing interaction tim

In the US you can blame private equity for that. Buying up practices and pushing them to turn a profit by maximizing patient load and minimizing interaction times etc... We have far more doctors per capita than we did in 1960.

bell-cot 2y ago
> In the US you can blame private equity for that... Only partly. Where I'm living (SE Michigan), one of the two huge local hospitals is owned & operated by a major research university. The other one by a major Catholic non-profit. My (older) family & friends have been on the receiving end of lots of "the system cares only about itself, and many of the individual doctors obviously feel the same" horrors at both of those hospitals. And it's been that way for decades, minimum.
- sarchertech 2y ago
  Yeah it's possible for a non-profit to cause some of the same problems. But I guarantee you PE is still involved in that health system to a major extent. Many if not most of the doctors are going to be employees of private groups that the University hospital contracts out to.
  - bell-cot 2y ago
    I get the sense that you're only interested in finding PE anywhere near "the scene of the crime". Not the causality for bungled cases. 30 years ago, when there was vastly less PE in the medical field, those hospitals had the same problems. If Dr. Fubar was socially adroit with his fellow MD's, then it really didn't matter that he was a disaster for his patients.
    - sarchertech 2y ago
      The subthread was about people not having a single family physician. And private equity consolidating physician practices is a very well documented contributor to that. Bungled cases can have all sorts of causes, and I never said private equity was the cause of all of them. I never said private equity was the cost of any bungled cases despite the fact that they surely are. What I said you can blame private equity on is this > A few generation ago you had family doctors who knew pretty much everything about you from your birth to their retirement (or death even). Even I had that as a kid, and I'm not 40 yet. But to be fair. It's not just PE, it's consolidation in general, which can be lead by large non-profit hospital groups as well.

bell-cot 2y ago

> In the US you can blame private equity for that... Only partly. Where I'm living (SE Michigan), one of the two huge local hospitals is owned & operated by a major research university. The other one by a major Catholic non-profit. My (older) family & friends have been on the receiving end of lots of "the system cares only about itself, and many of the individual doctors obviously feel the same" horrors at both of those hospitals. And it's been that way for decades, minimum.

sarchertech 2y ago
Yeah it's possible for a non-profit to cause some of the same problems. But I guarantee you PE is still involved in that health system to a major extent. Many if not most of the doctors are going to be employees of private groups that the University hospital contracts out to.
- bell-cot 2y ago
  I get the sense that you're only interested in finding PE anywhere near "the scene of the crime". Not the causality for bungled cases. 30 years ago, when there was vastly less PE in the medical field, those hospitals had the same problems. If Dr. Fubar was socially adroit with his fellow MD's, then it really didn't matter that he was a disaster for his patients.
  - sarchertech 2y ago
    The subthread was about people not having a single family physician. And private equity consolidating physician practices is a very well documented contributor to that. Bungled cases can have all sorts of causes, and I never said private equity was the cause of all of them. I never said private equity was the cost of any bungled cases despite the fact that they surely are. What I said you can blame private equity on is this > A few generation ago you had family doctors who knew pretty much everything about you from your birth to their retirement (or death even). Even I had that as a kid, and I'm not 40 yet. But to be fair. It's not just PE, it's consolidation in general, which can be lead by large non-profit hospital groups as well.