The profit-obsessed monster destroying American emergency rooms

[MayReasonRule]

Private equity decimated emergency care in the United States — without you even noticing.

Billers — including private equity owners of emergency medicine practices — now have to ask insurance companies to pay the balance of their out-of-network bills. It turns out it’s a lot harder to extract unreasonable fees from insurance companies than from individuals.

The act served as the death (or near-death) blow for several emergency medicine groups backed by private equity, which at their peak staffed nearly one-fifth of American emergency departments. That really only means some of these firms are now being run with oversight from courts and creditors, not that all of them are out of business: They’re largely still standing, and many have since only expanded their footprint in emergency care.

[dalton99a]

1. Private equity should be banned from healthcare, housing, and essential sectors

Evil vultures, predators and leeches

[orthoclad]

2. The ultimate commodity: medical patients

Pay us or die.

Capitalism at its finest.

[dalton99a]

3. And their families as well

Spouses and children often have no idea

[Midnight Writer]

4. It's a real pisser to go to a doctor/hospital and not know if your treatment is the best for your health

or if is it the best for corporate profits.

[RandomNumbers]

5. The headline is a lie for some of us, we DID notice (the other part is 100% TRUE)

Yeah, not only emergency rooms, I would say healthcare generally is being decimated by the profiteers, and private equity seems to be the preferred tool.
From my observation, private equity is to previous health care profiteering methods, as a machine gun is to a pistol.

I'll admit I'm not smart enough to know how to stop it outside of a complete overhaul of the US Healthcare system - which of course is desperately needed but let's get real, what can REALLY happen in the US? Medicare for All or similar schemes would be nice, but they ain't happening any time soon. Meanwhile can we at least slow down the destruction of what healthcare we once had?