Investor-owned Health Care: The Hidden Blight on America’s “System”

Abstract

Investor ownership of US health care has grown exponentially in the past 50 years through ever closer ties with Wall Street corporate interests. More recently, private equity firms have accelerated this process, invariably with harmful impacts on access to affordable care, its quality, and profiteering, with little accountability. These impacts are fueled by several concurrent trends: (1) increasing privatization, (2) consolidation and mergers, (3) increasing bureaucracy and waste, and (4) profiteering that may bleed into outright fraud. This article traces the uncontrolled growth of health care costs and prices in recent decades, together with documented examples across the health care delivery system whereby profit-driven, investor-owned interests have compromised patient care. These include hospitals, emergency care, nursing homes, mental health, and practices of such specialities as obstetrics–gynecology and ophthalmology. These practices have compromised patient care in the midst of a pandemic and economic downturn, as reflected by markers of a system needing reform. A larger role of government is called for, together with the advantages of Medicare for All in establishing health care as a human right, not a privilege based on ability to pay.