Surprise billing — when your urgent or emergency medical care results in massive bills that your insurer won’t cover — are a life-destroying phenomenon for an increasing number of Americans, who not only can’t shop around for an emergency room from the back of an ambulance, but who also have no way to learn in advance whether their visit will generate five- or even six-figure bills.
Continue reading “American health care’s life-destroying “surprise bills” are the fault of local, private-equity monopolies”
Tag: hedge funds
Your massive surprise hospital bills are making bank for private equity
Private equity firms like Blackstone and KKR have acquired massive health companies like Teamhealth and Emcare, which bill out doctors to the hospitals they work for, taking those doctors out of the hospitals’ insurance agreements and massively hiking their fees — that’s why when you go to a hospital, even one that’s covered by your insurer, you still end up with massive surprise bills for your care.
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How hedge funds, Goldman Sachs, and corrupt executives used Gymboree’s chaotic bankruptcy to cash out while destroying the careers of loyal employees
Gymboree is one of the many companies acquired by Mitt Romney’s Bain Capital, through a “leveraged buyout” through which the company was loaded up with debt so that the hedge fund could cash out; the company was left with massive debts and cycled through a succession of incompetent, inexperienced grifter CEOs who eventually ran the company into bankruptcy.
Corbyn says he’ll end asset-stripping hostile takeovers
Labour leader and PM-in-waiting Jeremy Corbyn has promised that when he is Prime Minister, his government will introduce regulations that ban the finance-driven, asset-stripping hostile takeovers of UK companies, in a bid to make finance the “servants of industry not the masters of us all.”
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All that stuff that was “killed by the net”? The real culprit was hedge funds
The web blew up at the same time as the Reagan/Clinton/Bush financial bombs were detonating, leading to a huge private equity bubble in which super-wealthy Americans used debt financing and other forms of financial engineering to buy out successful companies, then hollowed them out, selling off their real-estate and plant, loading them up with debt, and raiding their reserve funds.
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Blame the US Retail Apocalypse on hedge funds and financialization, not Amazon and Walmart
America is in the midst of a “retail apocalypse”: 6,800 chain stores are closing this year. It’s true that online retailers and winner-take-alls like Walmart have delivered the coup de grace that finished off these stores, but the conditions that made them weak enough to kill are driven by Wall Street, not Walmart.
Trump’s “free market” FCC loves monopolies, especially when they rip off prisoners’ families
The American prison system is home to one of the greatest market-failures in the history of telephony (which is saying something): a monopolistic system in which sole-supplier, hedge-fund owned telcoms operators charge as much as $14/minute for prisoners to talk with their lawyers, families and loved ones.
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Hedge fund manager fails to beat the market, owes Warren Buffett a million bucks
Ten years ago, Warren Buffett bet celebrated hedge fund manager Ted Seides of Protégé Partners that an investment in a low-cost S&P 500 index fund would outperform an investment in Seides’s “fund-of-funds,” a basked of five funds managed by his firm.
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Connecticut’s undertaxed super-rich hedgies get “tax bills” from anti-cuts protesters
Connecticut, home to the richest hedge-fund managers in America, is going broke, cutting services and gutting pension plans to try and fill its $1.8B budget hole — a hole it plans on filling by taking away $1.5B from the state’s workers.
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Chinese government creates gate-guarded private village for hedge-funds near Hangzhou
Yuhuang Shannan — an hour’s high-speed train journey from Shanghai — is a newly formed, walled village in which only hedge fund employees and their visitors are allowed to venture, a kind of Canary Wharf with Chinese characteristics, with schools staffed by non-Chinese teachers, a private club, and its own health care facilities.
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