Death rates rose in hospital ERs after private equity firms took over, study finds

After hospitals were acquired by private equity firms, patient death rates in the emergency departments rose by 13% compared to similar hospitals, a study says.

NBC News

HOSPITALS: “High-markup” hospitals are overwhelmingly for-profit, located in large metropolitan areas and have the worst patient outcomes
https://www.uclahealth.org/news/release/high-markup-hospital...

>These “high-markup hospitals” (HMH), which comprised about 10% of the total the researchers examined, charged up to 17 times the true cost of care. By contrast, markups at other hospitals were an average of three times the cost of care.

>They also have significantly worse patient outcomes compared with lower-cost hospitals, new UCLA research finds.

NURSING HOMES:
Owner Incentives and Performance in Healthcare: Private Equity in Nursing Homes (
https://www.nber.org/papers/w28474

>After instrumenting for the patient-nursing home match, we recover a local average treatment effect on mortality of 11%. Declines in measures of patient well-being, nurse staffing, and compliance with care standards help to explain the mortality effect.

“High-markup” hospitals are overwhelmingly for-profit, located in large metropolitan areas and have the worst patient outcomes

Hospitals with the widest difference between the cost of their services and what they charge patients and insurance carriers are mostly for-profit, investor owned and located in large metropolitan areas -- and have worse patient outcomes.

I wonder if we will be allowed to share this information in the future in someone knew a love one died in for profit hospital that might provoke violence against feel market believers.
Isn't trading higher profit for +11% more deaths also violence?
To the extent it is, people are universally guilty of it, unless you can find a clear bright line for which selfish(/rational) decisions are violent and which aren't. Is it some number of hops from the person who dies that makes the difference?

> To the extent it is, people are universally guilty of it, unless you can find a clear bright line for which selfish(/rational)

We all ingest some level of arsenic, and are "universally" exposed to radioactivity, but just because something is falls on a continuous spectrum, doesn't mean all levels are equal, there is a point where it becomes too much. That point will not be the same for everyone, but it exists.

> Is it some number of hops from the person who dies that makes the difference?

Not according to the Nuremberg trials.

Right, so if that's something you believe, regarding Nuremberg, then you're basically acknowledging my point.

No, because you're insinuating that since we're all responsible for some micromorts[1], somehow our culpability is the same as those who are some responsible for hundreds or thousands of morts[0], which is equating across 10 orders of magnitude in risk to human lives.

1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micromort

2. Is that what you call 10^6 micromorts?

Micromort - Wikipedia

That's not actually what I'm saying at all. I'm saying that we make specific choices that have material mortality costs to the world, not that simply by taking up space in our living room we're responsible for some number of nanomorts or whatever. Speeding on the road isn't the most important of those choices, but it's usefully easy to reason about, so start there. If you want to get closer to the culpability that a PE firm has, think about all the ways in which we deliberately benefit from global inequality.

All of this can be (is!) bad. But it's not violence in any meaningful sense of the term.