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Private equity investors are rapidly scooping up thousands of health care businesses, taking over emergency rooms or entire hospitals, and becoming major players in physician practices and patient care, from cradle to grave. But these acquisitions are often invisible to federal regulators. And their profit motives raise concerns about rising prices and the quality of treatment.
Private equity firms have shelled out almost $1 trillion to acquire nearly 8,000 health care businesses, in deals almost always hidden from federal regulators. The result: higher prices, lawsuits, and complaints about care.
Hospitals, boosted by private equity-backed staffing companies, have embraced a new idea: the obstetrics emergency department. Often, it is just a triage room in the labor-and-delivery area, but it bills like the main emergency department.
Investors are banking on increased demand in death care services as 73 million baby boomers near the end of their lives.
I don’t like using hyperbole, but as a provider I have never seen anything like this.
Dr. Jonathan Guerra-Rodríguez, ICU nurse and internist
When Private Equity Comes for Rural Hospitals
MEXICO, Mo. — When the new corporate owners of two rural hospitals suddenly announced they would stop admitting patients one Friday in March, Kayla Schudel, a nurse, stood resolute in the nearly empty lobby of Audrain Community Hospital: “You’ll be seen; the ER is open.”
The hospital — with 40 beds and five clinics — typically saw 24 to 50 emergency room cases a day, treating patients from the surrounding 1,000-plus acre farms and tiny no-stoplight towns, she said. She wouldn’t abandon them.
A week later Noble Health had the final word: It locked the doors.
The U.S. Labor Department investigates Noble Health after former employees of its shuttered Missouri hospitals say the private equity-backed owner took money from their paychecks and then failed to fund their insurance coverage.
Two Missouri towns are without operating hospitals after private equity-backed Noble Health left both facilities mired in debt, lawsuits, and federal investigations. The hospitals’ new operator, Platinum Health, agreed to buy them in April for $2 and laid off the last employees in early September.
A months-long KHN examination of the system meant to bar fraudsters from Medicaid, Medicare, and other federal health programs found gaping holes and expansive gray areas through which banned individuals slip to repeatedly bilk taxpayer-funded programs.
Private equity groups are cashing in on rising rates of alcohol and drug addiction in the U.S. But they aren’t necessarily investing in centers with the best treatment standards, and they often cut extra services.
While some doctors seem eager for a huge payoff, others are warily watching what happens when private equity firms take charge of orthopedic practices.
Doctors, consumer advocates, and some lawmakers are looking forward to a California lawsuit against private equity-backed Envision Healthcare. The case is part of a multistate effort to enforce rules banning corporate ownership of physician practices.
Private equity-backed Headlands Research heralded its covid-19 vaccine trials as a chance to boost participation among diverse populations, then it shuttered multiple sites that conducted them.
Four Seasons Health Care collapsed after years of private equity investors rolling in one after another to buy its business, sell its real estate, and at times wrest multimillion-dollar profits from it through complex debt schemes. The deal-making failed to account for the true cost of senior care.
As private equity groups are swarming into aging America’s eye care, the consolidation is costing the U.S. health care system and patients more money.
Private equity firms are seeing opportunities for profit in hospice care, once the domain of nonprofit organizations. The investment companies are transforming the industry — and might be jeopardizing patient care — in the process.
At a moment when half of U.S. states stand poised to outlaw or sharply curtail abortion services, the nation’s most popular emergency contraception brand rests in the unlikely stewardship of two private equity firms.
Colorado lawmakers approved a measure that will make it easier for people to fix their power wheelchairs when they wear out or break down, but arcane regulations and manufacturers create high hurdles for nationwide reform.
An aging population in need of regular cancer screenings has driven private equity companies, seeking profits, to invest in many gastroenterology practices and set up aggressive billing practices. Steep prices on routine tests are one consequence for patients.
In his State of the Union address, President Joe Biden decried these financial arrangements, which two members of the powerful House Ways and Means Committee had already asked the Government Accountability Office to investigate.
Nearly all psychiatric residential treatment centers for children in South Carolina operate as for-profit businesses — some backed by private equity — and many prioritize out-of-state kids because it’s better for the bottom line. The scramble to secure treatment for children and teenagers has become so competitive that South Carolina will spend millions more each year as of April 1 to keep out-of-state patients from flooding the state’s treatment facilities.
Their model is to deliver short-term financial goals and in order to do that you have to cut corners.
Mary Inman, attorney
KFF Health News analyzed 600 deals by 25 firms PitchBook identified as the top private equity investors in health care. Click below to view the acquisitions and top investors across the country.
Fred Schulte
Sarah Jane Tribble
Rae Ellen Bichell
Blake Farmer
Markian Hawryluk
Emmarie Huetteman
Victoria Knight
Harris Meyer
Emily Pisacreta
Rachana Pradhan
Renuka Rayasam
Lauren Sausser
Christine Spolar
Sarah Varney
Lauren Weber
Bernard J. Wolfson
Matt Kile
Joe Martinez
Albert Riley Jr.
John Hillkirk
Kelly Johnson
Nathan Payne
Matt Volz
Sabriya Rice
Holly Hacker
Terry Byrne
Kytja Weir
Lydia Zuraw
Eric Harkleroad
Oona Tempest
Hannah Norman
David Hicks