Today’s links When private equity destroys your hospital: Looters literally want to kill you. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. This day in history: 2009, 2014, 2019, 2022 Colophon: Recent publications, upcoming/recent appearances, current writing projects, current reading When private equity destroys your hospital (permalink) As someone who writes a lot of fiction about corporate crime, I naturally end up spending a lot of time being angry about corporate crime. It’s pretty goddamned enraging. But the fiction writer in me is especially upset at how cartoonishly evil the perps are – routinely doing things that I couldn’t ever get away with putting in a novel. Beyond a doubt, the most cartoonishly evil characters are the private equity looters. And the most cartoonishly evil private equity looters are the ones who get involved in health care. (Buckle up.) Writing for The American Prospect, Maureen Tcacik details a national scandal: the collapse of PE-backed hospital chain Steward Health, a company that bought and looted hospitals up and down the country, starving them of everything from heart valves to prescription paper, ripping off suppliers, doctors and nurses, and callously exposing patients to deadly risk: https://prospect.org/health/2024-02-27-scenes-from-bat-cave-steward-health-florida/ Steward occupies a very special place in the private equity looting cycle. Private equity companies arrange themselves on a continuum of indiscriminate depravity. At the start of the continuum are PE funds that buy productive and useful firms (everything from hospitals to car-washes) using “leveraged buyouts.” That means that they borrow money to buy the company and use…Pluralistic: When private equity destroys your hospital (28 Feb 2024)