How Private Equity Vultures Are Eviscerating US Healthcare | Laura Katz Olson | TMR

Private equity (PE) firms use considerable debt and other people's money to buy and sell businesses with the aim of earning supersized profits in the shortest time possible, and now they are buying everything from medical centers to emergency medical transportation. In Ethically Challenged, Laura Katz Olson investigates how PE firms are impacting physician and dental practices, home care and hospice agencies, substance abuse, eating disorder, and autism services, and emergency medical transportation, arguing that public pension funds, which provide the preponderance of equity for PE buyouts, tend to ignore the fact that their money may be undermining the health care system. Olson offers a unique perspective and appreciation of the significance of PE investments in health care, exposing the nefarious side of its maneuvers and the impact on cost and quality of care. The book weaves together insights from interviews with business owners and experts, newspaper articles, purchased data sets, and industry publications, making it the first book to comprehensively address private equity and health care.

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Laura Katz Olson distinguished professor of political science at Lehigh University and author of ethically challenged private Equity storms U.S health care. Laura, thank you so much for coming on today. Well, it's my pleasure. I should say I went to Lafayette. so we're supposed to have a deep rivalry. I know I don't really care too much about that but it is funny too. It's a big issue at Lehigh and Lafayette. it is exactly. So let's just start with the history of Private Equity. I know that was kind of chapter two of your book but for our audience, I think it would be a great place to start how it kind of grew out of this era of privatization and deregulation in the 70s and 80s. well, it started in the 70s but it was really very small scale. but it started to pick up in the 1980s especially because there was a sauce of very very in well I should say inexpensive but a huge source of money. junk bond the junk by the junk bond industry. and in the early years, it was they would just sort of take over companies. you know they wouldn't even negotiate. they would just take over companies. and you know they were seen as some pretty ugly Raiders. One of the most important books on the issue was called The Barbarians are coming. and or I'm sorry The Barbarians are at your gate. they're already here. right. and what they would do is they would take some big company and in those days these companies would be huge conglomerates with lots of different pieces to them. like cigarettes and cookies and magazines and just you know everything all together. and they would buy the whole conglomerate and then sell off the pieces. because the pieces were worth far more than the whole. and they would pocket of course all of this. and they were very successful. It turned out to be a very lucrative investment for private equity owners. so that's how it began. they were just basically corporate raiders. and butchers too right in the sense that they were cutting up these pieces of companies and selling them off for parts. And then you know in innumerable cases these companies will go bankrupt right? yeah, so how does that work? I mean I want to get into some more modern examples of it as well. But I think people who are learning about this for the first time might say, well, how is their profit in taking on companies that are in such deep Financial straits and then selling it off?