alt Hacker NewsMedicine is extremely capex intensive and only become more so. Sucking private capital out of healthcare is going to make it vastly worse for everyone; higher prices and less innovation. I think we can criticize the often ruthlessness of PE while realizing that limiting medicine's ability to invest would be a huge self-own and only force further centralization into the biggest non-profit centers.
Medicine is already held back enough by the lack of ability to use debt to finance its sales, unlike almost every other industry; you can repossess a car but you can't repo an implant or administered drug, forcing everything to be paid for in cash upfront. Medicine needs as much access to capital as it can get.
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I have no words for how completely toxic the surge of PE in healthcare has been. It's driven the degradation of care everywhere I've been. Healthcare chains have no issues with investment (see any annual reporting document to see how much money is sitting in various investments, mostly RE); smaller clinics being eaten up by PE chains is not an answer to centralization, it's just another mechanism of it.
It feels to me as if the US is a useful example for the outcomes of a focus on capitalist ideals does for medical services in a country.
Apologies if an AI summary is offensive to some, but here we go:
> The US is a world leader in advanced and specialist medicine, but its overall system for providing affordable, accessible, equitable medical care to its citizens ranks poorly—last among the 10 comparable high-income countries in the strongest recent comparison.
Both sources are the same site:
https://www.commonwealthfund.org/sites/default/files/2024-09...
https://www.commonwealthfund.org/publications/fund-reports/2...
" less innovation"
"Innovation" as in marketing expenses and stock buybacks?
> Sucking private capital out of healthcare is going to make it vastly worse for everyone; higher prices and less innovation.
Injecting PE into healthcare is what made it vastly worse for everyone in the first place. You can't have it both ways.