141–150 of 415 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It seems like a vet would be about as expensive as opening a restaurant, maybe 1-3x as much. That doesn't seem like the most capital intensive thing ever.
Other than the doctorate, of course.
To me it seems like PE has simply discovered a loophole in the system. We want a system where creating value for people is rewarded, but PE has found a way to legally get the rewards without improving society. Normally this is called a scam or a fraud, and there are laws for standard stuff like taking people's money without giving them what you promised. For PE however, they've found a way around it, using the machin…
I’m not sure that’s the model PE is using in healthcare. My impression is that they’re buying hospitals and medical practices, then obscuring the cost of actually providing care, so they can charge insurance companies not something reasonable like cost+20% but rather the maximum amount they think they can get out of the insurance company. Their financial modelers figure out after each procedure the max they can charge based on the procedure, the insurance company and plan, patient’s finances, etc.
The net effect is to drive up medical insurance costs across the country, impoverishing and bankrupting many people while a small number of PE folks get rich. It’s an entirely extractive business model, not wealth-creating or innovation-producing.
Laws that simply require total transparency in medical care pricing and pre-publication of prices for all procedures and drugs would probably go a long way toward fixing this, and in a capitalism-compatible way. We require transparency among publicly traded companies, SEC has extensive rules about that, but less so for private ones like hospitals and medical practices. That’s the loophole PE is exploiting.
america, unsatisfied with spending vastly more privately on healthcare than the rest of the world, while also spending more publicly on healthcare than the rest of the world, continues to find ways to make healthcare yet more expensive and ruinous for its citizens.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
On top of this, most of it is leveraged capital at a fraction of the actual cost, so the risk is almost vacant for the firms. Corrupt banking leads to infinite leverage for the super-wealthy to buy up / control it all. They do not need to care because they risk little and still profit even if it crashes because the tangible assets have shifted to their side of the gap.
Is it leveraged? Or is it often times money from underfunded government employee pension funds and whatnot, seeking higher returns to make up for the underfunding from previous decades?
It is a lot of debt/leverage at this point -- https://www.wsj.com/articles/private-equitys-food-binge-goes...
The funds snapped up a record 786 makers of food and beverages worth $32 billion in 2021, using bundles of debt to pay for their purchases, according to data from S&P Global Market Intelligence.
To me it seems like PE has simply discovered a loophole in the system. We want a system where creating value for people is rewarded, but PE has found a way to legally get the rewards without improving society. Normally this is called a scam or a fraud, and there are laws for standard stuff like taking people's money without giving them what you promised. For PE however, they've found a way around it, using the machin…
Think the economic reality is that the days of a doctor hiring a couple employees and hanging their shingle are over. The capital requirements are too high and the counter parties too big for individuals to thrive anymore. PE is one of the ways to consolidate and get some economies of scale. Plus I think most doctors prefer doctoring to running a business.
The PE in the article is firms with other values than what traditional medical professionals have, and those values are conflicting.
To me it seems like PE has simply discovered a loophole in the system. We want a system where creating value for people is rewarded, but PE has found a way to legally get the rewards without improving society. Normally this is called a scam or a fraud, and there are laws for standard stuff like taking people's money without giving them what you promised. For PE however, they've found a way around it, using the machin…
I think it should be illuminating to balance narratives like this with simple questions along classical economic lines: 1. Why is private equity ending up with all these resources? Who is selling to them and why? Why didn't this happen before? It's not like PE is new. 2. When PE loads up a firm with supposedly unsustainable billions of debt, someone is on the other side of that transaction, lending the billions. Who…
How do you get businesses to agree to your terms? Well, they hired consultants at some point. Oh, those guys are your buddies, too. You have acquaintances on the BoD, too.
Why go through all the trouble? Besides the fact that you're becoming filthy rich, you also have the opportunity to remove rivals and consolidate markets under an n-opoly. More money. More control.
>"Unpleasant things are happening, we need some sort of regulation" doesn't seem like a sufficient basis for socially beneficial action.
How about fraud and insider trading?
I realize that this is a simplistic and somewhat paranoid take on the matter, but in a society with a broad and continuous history (distant and recent) of corruption at elite levels, maybe securities violations and revolving door employment aren't just for our politicians. I wonder if we're dealing with Occam's Razor: how are PE firms achieving phenomenal profits while the businesses they use to do so die? Easy: they're cheating.
To me it seems like PE has simply discovered a loophole in the system. We want a system where creating value for people is rewarded, but PE has found a way to legally get the rewards without improving society. Normally this is called a scam or a fraud, and there are laws for standard stuff like taking people's money without giving them what you promised. For PE however, they've found a way around it, using the machin…
To me it seems like PE has simply discovered a loophole in the system. We want a system where creating value for people is rewarded, but PE has found a way to legally get the rewards without improving society. Normally this is called a scam or a fraud, and there are laws for standard stuff like taking people's money without giving them what you promised. For PE however, they've found a way around it, using the machin…
> To me it seems like PE has simply discovered a loophole in the system. The fundamental loophole is that "the free market" is practically a religion in the United States (the so-called Invisible Hand taking the role of a god doling out rewards and punishments), and a significant portion of the population is vehemently opposed to any regulation of capital. You can even see this attitude in some of the comments here,…
Of course, I don't actually think you believe this bit about the free market. I think you've been trained to rant here because this community rewards views like that.
To me it seems like PE has simply discovered a loophole in the system. We want a system where creating value for people is rewarded, but PE has found a way to legally get the rewards without improving society. Normally this is called a scam or a fraud, and there are laws for standard stuff like taking people's money without giving them what you promised. For PE however, they've found a way around it, using the machin…
I think it should be illuminating to balance narratives like this with simple questions along classical economic lines: 1. Why is private equity ending up with all these resources? Who is selling to them and why? Why didn't this happen before? It's not like PE is new. 2. When PE loads up a firm with supposedly unsustainable billions of debt, someone is on the other side of that transaction, lending the billions. Who…
This is where discussions break down because there's broad disagreements on what is and is not considered "voluntary" - there are ethical/moral traditions that claim nothing is voluntary, while others that claim everything is.
We can gain clarity by defining the opposite then: Involuntary
So, what set of circumstances would be required to declare that someone is doing labor "Involuntarily?" and thus there is no "free market" for labor.
For example, would you say that the person who is manually sorting trash out of recycling for Maybe someone really loves that and wants to do it and would do it for free. That's possible but unlikely. Maybe someone made decisions such that this is the only job that they can get without moving or some other major life decision. Is that still voluntary simply because they are in that position? Assuming they aren't disabled, they can always put their things in a bag and walk to some place with more options. What of people that are disabled then? How much of what they do is voluntary? You get the point
The challenge then is asking, given that there is no OBJECTIVE answer to the question of what is voluntary (Extreme example: You should be constantly trying to break out of prison, otherwise you doing what the guards tell you to is "voluntary") then "voluntary" shouldn't be a discriminator on whether society has something to say about a transaction between people.
Extreme (unreasonably IMO) freemarketeers view individuals as atomic complete units and that's the end of the story. So irrespective of starting or current positions EVERYTHING is voluntary and the world is all-v-all pvp no hold barred competition. That's who is in PE and finance, so that's what you're up against.
To me it seems like PE has simply discovered a loophole in the system. We want a system where creating value for people is rewarded, but PE has found a way to legally get the rewards without improving society. Normally this is called a scam or a fraud, and there are laws for standard stuff like taking people's money without giving them what you promised. For PE however, they've found a way around it, using the machin…
> Normally this is called a scam or a fraud So why not call it a scam or a fraud? I know there's likely a solid legal argument for not classifying it as such, but laws can be changed.
This is its own thing that operates on another level.
The only thing they have in common is that people aren't getting the value they thought.