Private equity firms acquired more than 500 autism centers in past decade: study

Services that PE has ruined in my city by rent-seeking:

  - Veterinary services
  - Dental services
  - Optometry services
  - Urgent care services

My daughter is “on the spectrum” and dealing with these therapy places was just a huge waste of time and money. I don’t know if the places we went to were owned by private equity or what but the quality was really bad and this is in a major metropolitan area that is also affluent. The therapist seemed like good hearted people, but they were paid so miserably that there was constant turnover. The billing practices were always shady and complicated and frustrating. Not to mention most of these places have 6 to 12 months waiting list to see anybody in the first place.

If we’re going to stick with private ownership of our healthcare infrastructure, patient-facing providers should at least be required to be B Corps, with one Board seat set to represent the doctors’ and nurses’ interests and a second patients’ interests. (Not sure how you’d elect the latter.)

There should also be strict leverage, related-party transaction and dividend limits. In exchange, we might provide a public lender of last resort for healthcare providers who need a lifeline.

Banning private equity from healthcare is a good headline. And if I were a candidate, I’d probably run on it. But it’s a band-aid to a broader incentive problem.

I really dislike this, especially because it ultimately results in worse care for the kids.

I think the place I take my kid to for therapy is likely private equity owned, but it's also about the only place available in my area.

I know they are charging around $80 per season, and I also know that the salaries for their therapists are around $25 to $30 per hour.

That leaves a very healthy margin for everything from employee benefits to building rental to admin (which I think is probably where the majority of margin goes).

These should be useful signals to regulators. Regulation is imperfect but somehow we blame companies that take advantage, either of immature or nonexistent regulation (which might be the case here) or of poorly written regulation (e.g. circa 2000 California energy regulation that let Enron and company run wild).

These companies, in finding essentially arbitrage opportunities, are, perversely, helping strengthen regulation, but only if regulators pay attention to what is going on and do something about it, instead of just watching it happen.

Can anyone explain me like im 5 - what is the alternative and what’s so special about private equity firms in this context?

Like those centers are going to be owned by someone one way or another - what is so special or bad about equity firms vs alternatives?

Genuine question. Because I don’t have a clue how this works in US.

We already know that Private Equity kills people in the hospitals [1] and nursing homes [2] for profit. So why do we continue to allow them to operate Healthcare facilities?

[1] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2813379

[2] https://www.nber.org/papers/w28474

Private equity is into this. Into that. The problem is some folks just got too much damn money. They gotta put it somewhere.

If anyone wants to see how private equity has transformed the veterinary industry check out www.privateequityvet.org/vet-list - over 7000 practices mapped across the US so far. Our dog died at the hands of a recently acquired PE practice :(

>“Private investors making a little bit of money while expanding access is not a bad thing, per se,” Singh said. “But we need to understand how much of a bad thing this is and how much of a good thing this is. This is a first step in that direction.”

Who gets to say what "a little bit of money" is here?

Are you surprised? there's money to be made.

Absolute cancer.

Private equity just makes everything worse for consumer. Squeezes every penny out.

ah yes, another market where the private equity scum have realised that "the market is inefficient" and that the existing businesses aren't "extracting maximum consumer surplus"

fortunately the UK doesn't have this problem for people as the state run healthcare system has set the price floor at zero

it hasn't stopped the private equity scum completely though, instead they have bought up most of the country's formerly independent vets

> From only 10% in 2013, almost 60% of veterinary practices are now owned by large companies

they then immediately "optimise the demand curve", doubling/tripling their prices, meaning there are now people that can no longer afford to treat their pets

Reading the headline all I can think about is that many people with autism are not capable of communicating, or if they are, only in a limited way. Literally people who do not have a voice to speak for themselves.

Try to buy an HVAC or heavy motor capacitor.. guess who owns all of the manufacturers?

Come to think of it, I don't think I've ever experienced a product or service that took a turn for the better, after the company was acquired by PE.

There might have been a time where PE bought up mismanaged companies, and turned them around - but the PE acquisition spree we've seen for the past 10 years or so...it seems exclusively to cause enshitification. And it is happening everywhere. There will always exist some niche PE firms for every sector out there, nothing is safe.

> The primary concern is that private equity firms may prioritize financial gains over families, said Daniel Arnold, a senior research scientist at the School of Public Health.

...may? How are they not already by gobbling them up in a calculated way. Targeting states with lax insurance claim scrutiny

If corporations are people than PE firms should be executed like the leaches on society they are. Nothing makes me see red like the fact that basic services are increasingly being captured by these disgusting rats so they can squeeze every last cent out of society possible.

What did you think was going to happen when you've got guaranteed payments and a growing customer base as people celebrate their "neurodiversity" whilst at the same time demanding subsidies and yelling "ableist" at anyone who criticises them or the system?

So politicians pretend to care by throwing more money at their cronies and get away with it because won't someone PLEASE think of the children. And then people pat them on back and vote for them in the next election, and blame "capitalism" while the people they've just voted back in make millions.

They even say "We're also dealing with children who are largely insured by Medicaid programs" and yet still people are failing to join the dots...

Private equity goes where the money is. Nothing is magically non-exploitative just because it's done by a bunch of small businessmen instead of a private equity company. There's a reason why Private Equity bought so many dialysis clinics. There's a reason why they're doing this.

It's easy to scam the government out of money for this because a bunch of well-meaning "useful idiots" will say "pay whatever it takes; give them as much money as they need; it's for human lives!" and none of that is true. It's all about using different battalions to rent-seek on normal tax-paying Americans.

Tim Walz lost his hope for re-election over this but he's not the only one. In time we will discover a large array of healthcare scams and home-care and autism/child mental health are going to be near the top.

Private equity in healthcare shows particularly clearly how far capitalism is willing to go. Profiting from the suffering of humans and animals, while probably still feeling good and even heroic about it, disgusts me.

Is it even moral to help people if investors aren't making a profit in the process? (/s)

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Because autists make the best engineers? So autism center becomes a recruiting tool.

Makes sense. Half the people I know now have autism including Elon musk so it’s quite lucrative.