Weirdest subplot I’m tracking: failing hospital economics. This is something that can only happen in the US because they’re run for profit (or on individual nonprofit basis). Often owned by PE firms. Seems their high-margin “products” are a) elective procedures b) ER visits...
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But this is bad. The PE firms should NOT get to socialize the costs of their profiteering in better times with no consequences during public service periods. I think the government should get equity for bailout even if the owners lose control. Indirect partial nationalization.
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Not saying you necessarily want state run healthcare. But a transient public ownership phase might be the perfect condition under which to pass much needed reform laws and get a better healthcare for all type deal done, with infrastructural skin in the game.
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Caveat: I just learned about all this via reading public news coverage in the last week or so. I’m sure my naive layperson gloss on this is the tip of a very deep iceberg, and that there’s already an invisible war underway for control of the future of the hospital system.
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If I got anything badly wrong please correct me. If you have good deeper links on this, please share. I’m not linking anything I’ve read so far because... they’re not particularly good links/sources.
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Yep. I haven’t dug into this deeply. I suspect it’s not the ER doctors who choose this but facility owners. https://twitter.com/oddcopter/status/1246850161483091968?s=21 …https://twitter.com/oddcopter/status/1246850161483091968 …
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Good point, but will be hard to financially engineer since only fed can print the brrr money to do this, and they won’t want to do it on behalf of states esp under Trump who will fight for his PE buddies in the biz like Schwarzman to retain control. https://twitter.com/shawnkumar1000/status/1246850701839314944?s=21 …https://twitter.com/shawnkumar1000/status/1246850701839314944 …
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Cory flagged this yesterday. https://twitter.com/doctorow/status/1246445485860118528?s=21 …https://twitter.com/doctorow/status/1246445485860118528 …
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Looks like at least some part of this is due to profiteeering ER docs https://twitter.com/oddcopter/status/1246853549977415685?s=21 …https://twitter.com/oddcopter/status/1246853549977415685 …
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Note that already in CARES act, one of the battles was over coverage of uninsured Covid19 patients *at Medicare rates*. Iirc there was a fight over that for precisely this reason. If the “government put” had been priced the way the owners wanted, the $ would have been way higher
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Twist. Not sure how to verify the actual pattern of cuts. This needs a good investigative journalist digging. https://twitter.com/stucchio/status/1246857095204311040?s=21 …https://twitter.com/stucchio/status/1246857095204311040 …
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End of conversation
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