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The profit-obsessed monster destroying American emergency rooms
Private equity decimated emergency care in the United States — without you even noticing.
At all of the private equity-acquired ERs where John worked, things changed almost overnight: In addition to having their hours cut, doctors were docked pay if they didn’t evaluate new arrivals within 25 minutes of them walking through the door, leading to hasty orders for “kitchen sink” workups geared mostly toward productivity — not toward real cost-effectiveness or diagnostic precision. Modern private equity got its start in the early 1980s, when a free-market acolyte — and former member of the Nixon administration — completed the first major “ leveraged buyout.” Using mostly borrowed money, William Simon and his partner bought a greeting card company, extracted huge fees, and then sold it for a massive profit less than two years later. When private equity comes for a lemonade stand (or for Toys “R” Us, Samsonite, Mitchell Gold + Bob Williams, or for any of the thousands of businesses these firms have taken over since they rose to prominence in the late 1980s), the result is often a sad story about the decline of a legacy brand — shoddy products and lost jobs.
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