Their favorite scam, the "leveraged buyout" is a mafia bustout dressed up in respectable clothes, and if you mourn a beloved, failed business, chances are that an LBO was the murder weapon, and PE was the killer:

pluralistic.net/2024/05/23/spi…

(Despite simplistic explanations and bad-faith apologestics, a leveraged buyout is *nothing* like a mortgage - it is a sinister, complex, destructive form of financial fraud:)

pluralistic.net/2024/08/05/rug…

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As bad as this is, it's ten quintillion times worse when applied to healthcare. When PE buys your hospital, people *die*. A *lot* of people:

pluralistic.net/2024/02/28/500…

PE doesn't even have to buy the whole hospital - for a long time, PE groups bought out anesthetist practices affilated with hospitals and pulled them out of the hospital's insurance affiliation.

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Unsuspecting patients who went in for routine surgery a hospitals that were in-network for their insurer would get a rude awakening from sedation: "surprise bills" running to tens or hundred of thousands of dollars. PE groups did the same thing with emergency rooms, so that people experiencing serious medical emergencies who had the presence of mind to insist upon being brought to an in-network ER nevertheless got hit with life-ruining surprise bills:

pluralistic.net/2022/03/14/unh…

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Donald Trump sometimes panders to anti-elitist elements in his base by threatening the private equity racket. For example, Trump has frequently railed against the "carried interest" tax loophole that allows PE bosses to pay half as much tax as you or I would on their vast takings.

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"Carried interest" is a tax law that gave 16th century sea-captains a break on their "interest" in the cargo they "carried." It is both weird and fantastically unjust that richest, worst financiers in America are able to take advantage of this Moby Dick-ass-law:

pluralistic.net/2021/04/29/wri…

But while Trump sometimes talks a good line about fighting private equity looters, he does not, has not, and will not lift a finger to them. He dares not.

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The carried interest tax scam is preserved in the Big Beautiful Bill, joined with many other giveaways the least productive, most guillotineable looters America has produced:

pillsburylaw.com/en/news-and-i…

Working people cannot rely on Trump's federal government and the Republican Congress to protect us from these vampires.

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Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman

“What came out of the House this morning doesn’t affect carried interest. The current carried interest will stay,” said Mark Leeds, a Tax partner at Pillsbury. It’s still too early for private equity ...

^{Pillsbury Law}

But this is America: when the feds fail, that creates an opportunity for state legislators to step in and act. And that's just what's happened in Oregon, where the state legislature has passed sweeping, bipartisan legislation that bans corporations from owning or operating a medical practice in the state:

prospect.org/health/2025-06-13…

This is called the "corporate practice of medicine" (CPOM) and it's *already* banned.

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‘So Much Evil Had To Happen for this Bill To Pass’

Oregon just made corporate medicine illegal, again. Here’s how it happened.

^{Maureen Tkacik (The American Prospect)}

The American Medical Association has a longstanding, absolute prohibition on medical practices that are run by anyone *except* a doctor. Oregon has had a CPOM ban on the law-books since 1947. Private equity meets this prohibition with a very transparent ruse indeed: they get a "rent a doc," often out of state, to serve as the nominal owner of their practices.

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The doctor takes orders from the PE firm, and hires the PE firm's outsource agencies to actually operate the clinic or hospital, absorbing the entirety of the practice's profits.

10/

The Oregon bill closes this loophole, and not a minute too soon. Giant healthcare monopolists - most notably groups associated with Unitedhealth, the largest health corporation in America - have embarked on a statewide buying spree, buying and shutting down rural hospitals and clinics, and transforming the remaining facilities into understaffed charnel houses that hemorrhage doctors.

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The bill took several tries to get trhough the legislature. As Oregon House Majority Leader Representative Ben Bowman told Matt Stoller and David Dayen on their Organized Money podcast, the statehouse was crawling with lobbyists hired by *out of state* private health-care firms who were worried about "contagion" if Oregon's bill passed and spread to other states:

organizedmoney.fm/p/how-oregon…

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How Oregon Is Ending Corporate-Run Healthcare

Welcome to the podcast Organized Money.

^{David Dayen (Organized Money)}

But the bill passed anyway, thanks to a combination of two factors. First, during the bill's legislative adventure, Unitedhealth's Optum bought out the Oregon Medical Group and made working conditions so terrible that dozens of doctors quit, leaving thousands of rural patients (from predominantly Republican districts) without medical care.

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Optum "fired" thousands of patients, including some who were undergoing cancer treatment, on the basis that they weren't profitable enough to care for:

thebignewsletter.com/p/private…

In the midst of all this, *another* Unitedhealth monopolist, Change Health, got hacked and virtually no one in America could get a prescription filled - worse, the hack exposed the health records of almost everyone in America, the largest health-related breach in US history:

pluralistic.net/2024/06/28/dea…

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