Washington’s Latest Health Care Whipping Boy

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U.S. healthcare is failing (obviously).  Over the years, Washington and their complicit media have identified many different groups as blame-worthy, including wealthy insurance companies, greedy doctors, Big Pharma, and over-charging hospitals.  Their newest target and designated bad boy is private equity.  The true guilty party remains in shadow and protected. 

The Biden administration’s latest healthcare culprits are private equity firms, who have invested more than $1 trillion purchasing healthcare facilities such as hospitals and nursing homes as well as medical practices.  “Private equity acquisitions of U.S. physician practices rose sixfold over a decade, from 75 deals in 2012 to 484 in 2021.”  Currently, approximately 8 percent of U.S. hospitals are owned by for-profit, private equity companies.

Washington has begun a federal probe into private equity in healthcare citing a single government-funded study reporting substandard outcomes.  Their investigation sends a clear message: “Our failing healthcare system is their fault!”

A recent study instigated by the NIH, performed by Harvard, and published in JAMA shows higher post-operative infection rates and more frequent patient falls in privately owned hospitals.  With the COVID scam fresh in American minds, the reliability of such reports, especially coming from those particular sources, is dubious.  The COVID experience has taught the public that censorship, including once prestigious Harvard and JAMA, is very real in healthcare.  Many ostensibly reliable scientific studies are in fact written for ideological advocacy and political gain rather than revealing objective, reliable medical facts.

Interestingly, the study noted above, while emphasizing the adverse impacts in private equity hospitals, also mentioned, then explained away, a slightly lower death rate. 

Washington downplays Americans’ major complaints about healthcare, which are unaffordability and inaccessibility.  Low quality is rarely if ever mentioned.  Federal politicos point to purported low quality in the eight percent of healthcare facilities that places where care is unavailable and too expensive.  They say, look at increased complications in a small number of patients.  They say, don’t look at death-by-queue in many Americans, especially in Medicaid or Tricare, where “47,000 veterans may have died” waiting for care. 

Washington focuses our attention on profit motive that may, rarely, cause low quality of medical care.  Washington doesn’t want us to notice that enrollment in Medicaid and ACA insurance goes up, Americans’ access to care goes down.  They hail the reduction in the uninsured rate while ignoring the seesaw effect.  As more people have government insurance, it becomes harder to get care, of any quality!  Federal politicos say, don’t think about why your government insurance doesn’t get you care, look at what those money-grubbing for-profit places are doing to you.

Washington’s diversionary use of private equity as whipping boy is not limited to healthcare, although healthcare attacks get more airtime than other targets, such as housing.  A recent study infers that the high cost of rent is driven by private equity acquisition of rental properties.

U.S. healthcare system failures cannot be attributed to private equity, venal insurance companies, or high-priced doctors.  The reason healthcare is dying and taking Americans with it is…Washington’s control.  The federal government diverts attention away from its own culpability.  For example, Washington points to whatever profit private equity generates so we won’t notice that 31 percent to more than 50 percent of all U.S. healthcare spending goes to…drumroll, please…the federal bureaucracy. 

The people doing the whipping are the ones who should be whipped. 

Federal politicians and bureaucrats are making medical as well as financial decisions in healthcare.  The people who should be making these decisions are We the People, or as I prefer, We the Patients.  After all, it is their money and their lives.

If people could shop for their own care and decide how to spend their own money (out of a large, unlimited family HSA), profit-motive would work to improve quality as well as access while simultaneously reducing costs.  Two trillion dollars (!) of healthcare spending — on interfering and unnecessary government regulation — could be saved.  The infusion of free market forces, glaringly absent from healthcare today, could achieve timely, quality, affordable, compassionate health care.  All we need to do is put We the People in charge instead of Them those Bureaucrats.  

Deane Waldman, M.D., MBA is professor emeritus of pediatrics, pathology, and decision science; former director of the Center for Healthcare Policy at Texas Public Policy Foundation; former director, New Mexico Health Insurance Exchange; and author of 12 books including the multi-award winning Curing the Cancer in U.S. Healthcare: StatesCare and Market-Based Medicine.

Image: Pkd2016 via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0.