I can’t speak to the Warren/Markey bill but the bottom line is there will be no way to stop Wall Street from strip mining healthcare as long as candidates are addicted to campaign cash from the wizards of finance.
We must make voters the donors who fund election campaigns. Then Washington will answer to us, not special interests.
We don't elect people willing to act against their own self interest. Here's a video explaining this phenomenon through the lens of comparing Star Wars and Star Trek: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=12JDlGnMiTM
Says the guy who has made political donations to Democrats. Unions are one of the biggest sources of campaign cash and much to the detriment of their members. So tired of people saying "save democracy" but only if it's their candidate that's going to do it...
Yes Mick, when either party complains about the other party’s campaign finance, it’s hollow because both parties take the big money. And I don’t see that either party even knows what democracy is: government by the people, which they don’t want because they think we’re children and we have little money to donate to their campaigns. Thanks for the comment.
I see union potical donations compared to corporate donations alot. I've love to see the numbers breakdown. My gut feeling is union money is probably a fraction of corporate.
Whether the bribes, err, contributions come from unions or big companies, the result is the same. You're arguing whether you'd rather be hit with a 9 iron in the left eye or right eye.
No, the unions represent the union itself, not the members. Corporations represent those rewarded for share price increases via bonuses and company stock.
Unions do a good job marketing themselves as 'for the workers' the same way corps mime 'maximizing shareholder value' when to get that, they'll sacrifice long term for short term bonuses that reward company execs.
Show me the behaviors and I'll show you the incentives.
Every other republic does limit the cost of campaigns but our Supreme Court, in its infinite wisdom, decided (Buckley v. Valeo, 1976) that money spent to help candidates is itself free speech, protected by the First Amendment.
This decision helped spark the arms race in campaign fundraising that gutted government by the people.
The only path to fixing this mess that the Court WON’T strike down as a 1st Amendment violation is some kind of public financing system. This wouldn’t limit anyone’s “speech” but would give candidates an alternative source of campaign funds so they don’t have to sell themselves to George Soros or Elon Musk.
The best public financing system is Voter Dollars, which gives the power of political speech to 170 million registered voters who can’t afford to donate to candidates out of their own pockets.
American citizens do not have enough money to outbid corporations and the wealthy. And they cannot promise them lucrative jobs on their boards or as lobbyists once out of office. The system is so completely corrupt that the only way change can occur is through revolution.
Thank you for your comment and I agree the whole system is rotten. My theory is that if we can fix campaign finance we would have the leverage and momentum to enact further reforms that would restore government by the people.
I'm an old man. I once shared your belief that political action on a broad front can lead to change. No more. It's too corrupt. Change through political action requires a foundation based on fidelity to the rule of law. That's gone. It requires trust in our institutions. That's gone and is very difficult to rebuild. Throughout our history the municipal police force has always defended the status quo through violence. It's become dangerous to protest. Political change is not possible without freedom of speech or the right to protest. How can change be communicated otherwise? How do we get a majority on the Supreme Court to reverse Citizens United? You can't just enact a law without consent of the Supreme Court. Good luck amending the constitution.
Thank you for your comment but part of the value of the Voter Dollars system I promote is that it would NOT require amending the Constitution. That’s part of why I put all my chips on this reform. This may be the only game changing campaign finance reform - short of an amendment - that would survive judicial review.
In your pessimism you are certainly in good company. But my 2023 survey of New Hampshire voters, 150+ media interviews on outlets of all political stripes, and conversations with over a thousand Americans all persuade me that it is eminently possible to build majority cross-partisan support for this reform. By itself it won’t completely solve the money problem, but will bring enough improvement to give the people hope and mobilize us in a broad effort to restore government by the people.
Please subscribe to my Substack. Going forward I’ll make the case for optimism in greater detail. Please also check out our website: www.savedemocracyinamerica.org
The current US financial system, with the instant creation of new dollars (in the form of debt) at its root, is inherently corrupting--and over many years has been slowly, and now relatively more quickly, strangling (and/or exporting) the real economy of goods and services.
Money, new and old (or more precisely, the holders and managers thereof) is continually chasing "investment opportunities"--income streams--that can be extracted from the goods-and-services economy (or from individuals more directly, such as in taxes spent for the benefit of the financiers). That's part of how we get outrageous defense system pricing, outrageous public health costs, and other outrageous government spending. (Example: ~$1,800,000 is spent per estimated covid hospitalization prevented and ~$50,000,000 is spent per estimated covid death prevented in the 6 mos. through 4-years cohort for the CDC-recommended childhood Pfizer covid vaccine--yet the recommendation stands--and appears on every child's "vaccination schedule.")
Monopolized currency creation corrupts not just the financial system and its incentives, but society at large, including politics. (Though politics would likely be corrupt even without financial corruption, I admit.)
Fundamentally, the power of issuing new *unsupported* currency should not exist--or it should be available to all--because wherever it does exist and is monopolized, corruption and oppression follow.
"For the love of money is the root of all evil: which while some coveted after, they have erred from the faith, and pierced themselves through with many sorrows." - This is the original line from the King James Bible, but interestingly it doesn't cover the sorrows inflicted upon others.
You can’t mount a viable campaign for national office without raising a ton of money. So candidates self censor to avoid alienating potential donors. That’s why they have little for us beyond slogans and personal attacks on their opponents. Indirectly the need for campaign cash does massive damage, though no one is actually buying votes. Thanks for commenting.
I suggest you examine Dave Brat's success against Eric Cantor, or Ms. Ocasio-Cortez knocking off Joe Crowley.
The big payoff on campaign contributions is being able to bank them, which certainly helps not-particularly-wealthy "public servants" become millionaires over time.
Yes, the court has gutted almost every limit on what big donors can spend, because campaign cash supposedly is a form of free speech.
For this reason, the only path to game changing reform - short of amending the Constitution - is a public financing system that creates an alternative pool of money candidates can use without selling out to special interests.
Of the public financing mechanisms, Voter Dollars is best because it gives every voter the power that comes with campaign cash.
Then he's going to want special interest groups to not independently spend, so AARP, NRA, unions - all the people that were on the Citizens United side - get shut out of the political process. Hmm, what does that leave?
Private Equity is a symptom, not the problem. Since the Global Financial Crisis,(the "GFC") the Federal Reserve has printed so much new money that they've had to invent "investment sponges" out of thin air to store it all. Hence, private equity, special-purpose acquisition corporations (SPACs), cryptocurrencies, NFTs, leveraged EFTs, thematic EFTs, the Green New Deal, the AI tech craze, etc.
Too much money created to keep an unsustainable economy afloat with the bulk of it being syphoned off by the same Wall Street playbook that created the GFC in the first place.
There are so many reasons, it would take an article, not a comment. However, some quick hits:
1. I believe the "basis trade" will trigger a liquidity crisis requiring Federal Reserve intervention to avoid a cascade of bank failures.
2. Japan and China, the two largest foreign owners of US Treasuries are dumping their holdings into the market. Japan is doing it to support the yen. China is doing it to wage war against the US dollar. In both cases, the Treasury market is being flooded with excess product
3. Due to high interest rates, Janet Yellen refinanced all notes and bonds that came due with short-term bills. Thus, Scott Bessent is now faced with refinancing $12 trillion in US debt every 30, 60 and 90 days. And having to do so in a market already being flooded with Treasuries due to #2 above. We're one failed Treasury auction away from possible default, a scenario that would cause a global depression.
4. Everyone on Wall Street wants the Fed to cut rates. However, the Fed cutting rates doesn't, in fact, cut rates. It creates money, which will then have to pursue assets, artificially driving up prices (the point of my initial post). Not only is this inflationary, it's a house of cards where value is being created from thin air.
In summary, the US economy is a juggler with too many balls in the air. Once one drops, they'll all drop.
It's also worth noting that the Biden administration cooked the books more than any other administration in recent memory. Jobs were severely overestimated, and those jobs that were created were all government jobs. The government doesn't produce anything, and only has funds that it takes from taxpayers. At the end of the Biden administration, the government was about 30% of our economy, and project to be about 50% by the end of the decade (spoiler alert: it will never get to that point, because the government will collapse long before then).
What do you think is going to happen when most people realize that they won't get medicare or social security? How they take my tax money knowing I won't be able to claim the benefit is beyond me. I'm skeptical of anything Elizabeth Warren and Ed Markey claim. Like Chuck Schumer, they always find a camera to be able to talk about how they're saving humanity. I'm not buying it. They'll probably try to pin all of this on Trump, when the truth is, it was already baked in.
At least Trump is doing *something*. It may not work, but it's better than waiting around, and hoping things get better.
My old lady's myopic eyes see Wall St (etc) as exactly like the government in that it creates nothing. The govt prints money and the financial sector moves money around to “create” profit/value. It all seems a sophisticated glory that I am too simple-minded to understand.
Not all of the financial sector "creates nothing" but I love this comment because the trends are clearly that the sectors hoovering up the most "funny money" are still gaining steam and finding new ways to screw the public - despite being clearly implicated in some of the worst fiscal behavior in modern history.
As someone who has sat on boards (both corporate and non-profit) the distinct-in-many-ways-but-also-similar pressures management faces for CONSTANT year over year growth and - where applicable - shareholder stock buy backs/profit sharing is just so clearly unsustainable.
That's true to an extent, although "wall street" encompasses a lot of different firms of different sizes, some of which actually do provide value and service. They undergird the economy in ways the government never can...
“The hedge fund will buy a US Treasury and then hedge against it (sell short) a similar futures security.
“Here’s how it works: funds buy long-term Treasury bonds (say, 10-year notes yielding 4%) while shorting Treasury futures contracts tied to the same maturity.
The futures price typically trades at a slight discount to the cash bond price due to financing costs and market mechanics, creating a spread—often just 10-20 basis points (0.1%-0.2%).
This trade is dollar-neutral: profits don’t hinge on bond prices rising or falling, just the spread getting smaller.
“But the real juice comes from leverage.
“Funds borrow heavily in the repo market—where they pledge the Treasuries as collateral for short-term loans at ever-so slightly lower rates—and then amplify their positions.
With $1 billion in capital, a fund might control $10 billion to $20 billion in Treasuries at 10:1 or 20:1 leverage.
And a 15-basis-point spread on $10 billion nets $15 million annually—a 1.5% return unlevered.”
Yes, private equity can be rapacious, and this is an exceptionally ugly example. But time and again, PE does exactly what it claims to do: I worked at and retired from a company that benefited enormously from the infusion of PE financial and intellectual capital. It’s difficult to make the case, as the author seems implicitly to favor (and his lede suggests), that government should draw lines around industries and bar PE from them.
Instead, I take two lessons from this debacle and its possible repetition: 1) notice that the Steward hospital “conglomerate” was already struggling long before Cerberus got their fangs into it; the US medical industry struggles generally under a nightmarish burden of multi-governmental regulation, perverse third party financial incentives, and poor administration. These problems existed before Cerberus appeared on the scene. Cerberus did not cause these problems, but they sure took advantage of them. There are many things that could be done to improve the efficacy and financial sustainability of medical providers, especially regional and rural hospitals, and none of them have anything to do with getting rid of PE.
And 2) this is *another* example of the need to simplify the US tax code, strip it to the bare essence of revenue generation, and get out of the special interests games. Money follows opportunity, and our lazy, not very bright, and easily bought legislators have been all too happy to make tax arbitrage more important than value creation. Remove the arbitrage incentives that riddle the IRC and state equivalents. All sorts of things will start to make more sense.
Very true. The point of investment of capital is to provide what is needed for an economy to run and thrive. Capital investment is not a charity and everyone is in this game through their ira, 401ks and 403b, not to mention their jobs which produce the capital. Gov feeds off capital it does not create anything.
Agree. The parent organization had already run it into the ground. They could have used the same sell/lease back mechanism to recapitalize the system, but voted to sell out. Probably an all volunteer board that was not going to spend excess time on a problem of their own creation. So they sold to Cerberus as an easy fix and could wash their hands of the problem.
OK, but some regulation seems in order here. Healthcare is not an efficient market in so many ways, least of all when it is most needed and only one option exists in a 40 mile radius. If hospitals are running out of fairly basic life-saving supplies, maybe they should be run more like, say, an airline, with stringent regulations around safety?
My daughter-in-law is a PA that recently started work for an equity healthcare play, not a hospital but a multi-practice mini-conglomerate. I'm still puzzled that doctors will sell off their practices and become employees of the company they sold to - but apparently they are. Locally to me, everything has become corporatized - my own primary care is now part of a state-wide "system" (even though not PE).
Older physicians are looking for an exit strategy from a long held practice, most younger physicians now have an enormous amount of educational debt and no way to buy into a practice. There is also little appetite to run a medical practice as the overhead/compliance expense can easily exceed 60% of revenue. Not to mention thetime required to run a practice and the lack of business education that physicians receive. The PE offer is often the best lump sum payment option available. The contract typically requires 2 to 5 years of continued employment at the practice, as the “good will
“ of the original physicians is the biggest asset in the sale. For any older physicians, this is the opportunity that exists.
Physicians use to be entrepreneurs. Now, especially the younger generation want steady paychecks and predictable hours. They would rather have a boss than work weekends
It costs a great deal of money today to set up a successful private practice. Most young physicians simply don’t have the cash, and many say they want to practice medicine and have some free time, rather than running a business.
The hospitals should have mortgaged their real estate and used it for the betterment of its institution.
But community hospitals have weakened and disappeared for a much bigger reason - the socialization of medicine when Medicare and Medicaid were created.
Before then, medical care wasn’t a financial backbreaker. Religious institutions sponsored many of the hospitals. Think, for example, in NYC Presbyterian Hospital, Mt. Sinai, St. Vincent’s and many more.
But Medicare/Medicaid became mandatory customers - they passed a law saying people couldn’t be denied care based upon inability to pay without creating any reimbursement mechanism. It’s like if you owned a grocery store and had to give away groceries without foodstamps or snap cards that pay you back 100 cents.
With Medicare and Medicaid, they don’t pay 100 cents.
So someone has to pay.
I had a hip replacement a few years ago and went out of network at my doctor’s recommendation. My insurer only paid $1,800 or so - they, like most other plans based on out of network reimbursements on the reimbursement rate established for the zip code where the service is provided.
The only person who would remove a hip for $1,800 works in the meat department of your local supermarket. My surgeon’s fee was $10,000.
A financially healthy hospital gets about 30% or so of its revenue from private pay patients. Mostly insurance and cash pay patients.
Those two non-governmental payers have to make up the shortfall. I paid my $8,200.
Insurers who control huge flows of patients can negotiate lower rates than the “book” rate. But it’s still way higher than the Medicare/Medicaid reimbursement. So all of you who pay health insurance premiums are paying a hidden tax.
So much for not taxing the middle class…..
Medicare itself is a scam.
When it started in 1965, the highest anyone had to pay annually in Medicare FICA payments was $27.10 a YEAR. Retirees were automatically grandfathered in and got lifetime retirement health benefits without having paid in a dime. Those working but halfway there got full coverage.
And it slowly went up, before it exploded under Clinton in 1994 when the Medicare wage cap was eliminated.
Here’s an extreme example of how crazy it’s gotten….Juan Soto, a 26 year old who makes $51 million together with his employer pays nearly $1.5 million a year for retirement health insurance that he can’t use for 40 years - even while he pays his current year insurance policy.
It is the cost shifting that has made health care so expensive for the average person. And it is Medicare and Medicaid that have destroyed hospitals.
"They" wanted to replace my hip 12 years ago. I got an antique hand-me-down cane instead. I'm 87, doing just fine, no assisted care, no maid, no cook, drive to the grocery, do my shopping, eat very well. Medical services are a joke, no price list. My auto mechanic and butcher are honest. Hey, thanks for that tip about the butcher. $1,800, huh? Not bad. To copy the late, great jack Benny, "I'm thinking it over."
Now do a story on the compensation of top executives of non-profit health care organizations. Non-profit organizations can't pay a return to owners, but some employees do very well.
Okay, here's a summary of how the UPMC CEO salary has changed over time, based on the info I found:
* **Jeffrey Romoff (Former CEO, retired in 2021):**
* **2009:** $4.01 million (salary, bonuses, and benefits) [^1]
* **2010:** $5.97 million (total compensation) [^2]
* **2019:** $9.5 million [^3]
* **2020:** $10.4 million [^4]
* **2021:** $10,387,010 [^5]
* **2022:** $12,880,205 (as former CEO) [^6]
* **2023:** $17,886,701 (as former CEO) [^7][^8]; also reported as almost $18 million [^9]
* **Leslie Davis (Current CEO):**
* **2022:** $4,211,830 (as SVP and COO) [^6]
* **2023:** $11,314,762 [^7][^8]; also reported as over $11 million [^9]
So, it looks like Romoff's compensation generally increased over the years, even after his retirement, and Davis's compensation also significantly increased when she took over as CEO.
Here is where universal health care paid for by your tax dollars might make a lot more sense. Non-profit and no more vampire squids sucking every last dollar out for private gain. I live in Canada and yes the quality of care can be less than desirable and we certainly have issues of inadequate funding resulting in long wait times for everything but sure beats this nonsense.
What we have clearly isn’t working, but there is no sane person who can advocate for turning more of the healthcare system over to the federal government. I really don’t know what the fix is going to be.
The fix is to be healthier, and provide more low cost access like the Doc in a box model. Blood tests are cheap and readily available and they give you the results with comparisons to healthy results. You don't need to even see a doctor to get a blood test and the results are pretty easy to understand.
That’s probably how it will evolve. I notice in my own case I try to avoid doctors and hospitals, if I can. If enough people get pushed the same way, the demand changes, so naturally the type of services and costs change, too. Taking care of your own health better would be a key factor.
Same here but it shouldn’t require a doctorate in navigating a broken system to get normal healthcare. Grandma Average can’t find her way through the maze of a broken system and that’s not ok.
My mother lived to be 101 in a small town in Canada. She had superb care her entire life. I've heard complaining about Canadian health care, but I never observed any problems in her case or those of her friends. When she was 95 she suffered a broken hip late Christmas Eve. The local surgeon came in Christmas Day and gave her a new tip.
Thanks for the illuminating article Matt. Very sad indeed (but not surprising). Never thought the day would come that I would agree with Elizabeth Warren, but then again I won’t hold my breath for her and Mark to get anywhere on this.
I don't know which notion is more flabbergasting: That anyone (ESPECIALLY an outfit meant to save people from the jaws of death!) would trust them, or that they thought it was a good idea to name themselves that to begin with.
This is the definitional sign of our times, society wide. Anywhere I look I see a now common transgressional violation of what were formerly taken as boundary norms, now pushing egregiously to the point of grotesquerie against our limits of honor, of self-respect, and yes, the essence of 'love' itself, in a meme-like, staring into the mirror quality of "At last, at long last, have you no decency, sir?"
How can we not hear the sirens, see the multi-hued flashing lights, even the moans of the victims from behind the camouflage of rationalization "becuz profit" behind this thus far implacable and relentless, teeth-gnashing loss of self respect as we witness our overwhelming by the utter wretchedness of these perpetrators of society's own core self-destruction?
That was/is an horrendous situation, but ask yourself what would have happened had Cerberus not purchased those struggling hospitals. They would still have gone bankrupt, just 11 years earlier. Were there other buyers at the time, ready to bail them out? I truly don't know, but I doubt it.
My own limited experience is that hospitals are usually poorly managed, whether they are for profit or not. And I don't know what the solution is, but I don't believe that banning private equity purchases is going to advance quality care in US hospitals.
I worked in the healthcare industry from 1994 - 2005. I saw the industry change during this time. We were lucky in that we had multiple hospitals within a 40 mile radius. These hospitals used to be known for specializing in maybe 1 or 2 areas each so as not to compete with neighboring hospitals. Then came the MBAs who changed the mind set to we should offer every specialty and squash the other hospitals (even though they didn't have the patient base to justify the cost).
Oh, and our state had a government" oversight" agency that was supposed to monitor hospitals and not allow them to get programs where their patient base didn't warrant the cost. Well, more often than not programs got implemented once the $300,000 was paid to the agency.
Single site community hospitals just don’t have the scale of operations and customer base to support all the specialties and associated costs. As medical tech expands that trend becomes more pronounced. It is a really hard business and the bigger not for profit chains have obviously focused on consolidating with the best community hospitals instead of the least attractive.
That is not to say that this case is free from criticism. But the underlying financial issue isn’t the ownership model.
Rural hospitals also have a higher percentage of Medicare and Medicaid patients which, as another commenter pointed out, reimburse at rates that are below cost. As the hospital doesn't have enough private insurance patients to make up the difference, it ends up squeezed into insolvency.
There is a problem here, but it would be crazy to expect Warren and Markey to make things better. The real targets of their exploitation of the issue will be elsewhere.
Warren and Markey could have joined the MAHA movement, supported Kennedy and the other appointees in reforming healthcare, but their concerns stop at political boundaries.
Exactly. The common political playbook begins with an attention grabbing title for a bill. This will become the main marketing headline. Then the actual work of negotiating the pork allotments begins. The bill, which by the time of a vote is anything but what it's title implies, is simply a stealth vehicle used to camouflage the politicians' pay outs to their loyal donors.
Terrible stories and believable in every way. Glad to be retired from internal medicine after several decades of seeing the degradation of medicine, in all manner possible. I just could not stand it any more. Lizzie whines a lot and wags her finger pretending to be bitter, but she’ll never lift a hand to help this situation. She talks big, though. Sickening. And even more sickening, is that so many simpletons still believe her!
Not for profit healthcare systems aren’t any better. They grift a different way by not paying taxes in the towns they operate. Not for profit seems like noble cause in medicine. It’s not. All that means is at the end of the year there’s zero profits. That doesn’t mean the presidents of these companies isn’t getting paid handsomely plus the bonus they get to make sure that zero comes up in the profit margin. Our hospital in town has purchased every house surrounding the actual hospital in case it wishes to expand in the future and we are talking streets of houses that have now been taken off the property tax rolls. Ethical? I think not.
Thanks for this story! More Americans should know about the depredations of private equity. I'd venture to say the vast majority don't know anything about PE, not even the people who work for companies owned by PE. I worked for a venerable old company for 15 years that was destroyed by PE and none of us had a clue as to the nature of the beast that owned us. Not once did we meet anyone from the firm; they existed at a safe distance from us.
It was some time ago, but if memory serves me correctly, our parent company at the time, fell into debt over a real estate deal gone wrong and sold us to pay for the debt.
I can’t speak to the Warren/Markey bill but the bottom line is there will be no way to stop Wall Street from strip mining healthcare as long as candidates are addicted to campaign cash from the wizards of finance.
We must make voters the donors who fund election campaigns. Then Washington will answer to us, not special interests.
www.savedemocracyinamerica.org
People run for Congress in order to quickly become multi-millionaires. Influence peddling is now universal.
No argument there! Thanks for responding.
Term limits, one policy that left and right can agree on.
We don't elect people willing to act against their own self interest. Here's a video explaining this phenomenon through the lens of comparing Star Wars and Star Trek: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=12JDlGnMiTM
this would not work unless the law also banned contributions coming from outside a Congressional district
Says the guy who has made political donations to Democrats. Unions are one of the biggest sources of campaign cash and much to the detriment of their members. So tired of people saying "save democracy" but only if it's their candidate that's going to do it...
Yes Mick, when either party complains about the other party’s campaign finance, it’s hollow because both parties take the big money. And I don’t see that either party even knows what democracy is: government by the people, which they don’t want because they think we’re children and we have little money to donate to their campaigns. Thanks for the comment.
I see union potical donations compared to corporate donations alot. I've love to see the numbers breakdown. My gut feeling is union money is probably a fraction of corporate.
Whether the bribes, err, contributions come from unions or big companies, the result is the same. You're arguing whether you'd rather be hit with a 9 iron in the left eye or right eye.
The result is different in that unions represent citizen workers i.e. constituents. Corporations represent shareholders. They have different goals.
No, the unions represent the union itself, not the members. Corporations represent those rewarded for share price increases via bonuses and company stock.
Unions do a good job marketing themselves as 'for the workers' the same way corps mime 'maximizing shareholder value' when to get that, they'll sacrifice long term for short term bonuses that reward company execs.
Show me the behaviors and I'll show you the incentives.
SEIU alone in 2024 spent $200-million. The comment below is a pretty accurate comparison of the difference between corporate and union donations.
I agree completely with your first paragraph.
However, "make voters the donors"? How about thinking up a new way to run campaigns that doesn't cost the earth?
Every other republic does limit the cost of campaigns but our Supreme Court, in its infinite wisdom, decided (Buckley v. Valeo, 1976) that money spent to help candidates is itself free speech, protected by the First Amendment.
This decision helped spark the arms race in campaign fundraising that gutted government by the people.
The only path to fixing this mess that the Court WON’T strike down as a 1st Amendment violation is some kind of public financing system. This wouldn’t limit anyone’s “speech” but would give candidates an alternative source of campaign funds so they don’t have to sell themselves to George Soros or Elon Musk.
The best public financing system is Voter Dollars, which gives the power of political speech to 170 million registered voters who can’t afford to donate to candidates out of their own pockets.
Thanks for the excellent comment.
www.savedemocracyinamerica.org
American citizens do not have enough money to outbid corporations and the wealthy. And they cannot promise them lucrative jobs on their boards or as lobbyists once out of office. The system is so completely corrupt that the only way change can occur is through revolution.
Thank you for your comment and I agree the whole system is rotten. My theory is that if we can fix campaign finance we would have the leverage and momentum to enact further reforms that would restore government by the people.
I'm an old man. I once shared your belief that political action on a broad front can lead to change. No more. It's too corrupt. Change through political action requires a foundation based on fidelity to the rule of law. That's gone. It requires trust in our institutions. That's gone and is very difficult to rebuild. Throughout our history the municipal police force has always defended the status quo through violence. It's become dangerous to protest. Political change is not possible without freedom of speech or the right to protest. How can change be communicated otherwise? How do we get a majority on the Supreme Court to reverse Citizens United? You can't just enact a law without consent of the Supreme Court. Good luck amending the constitution.
Thank you for your comment but part of the value of the Voter Dollars system I promote is that it would NOT require amending the Constitution. That’s part of why I put all my chips on this reform. This may be the only game changing campaign finance reform - short of an amendment - that would survive judicial review.
In your pessimism you are certainly in good company. But my 2023 survey of New Hampshire voters, 150+ media interviews on outlets of all political stripes, and conversations with over a thousand Americans all persuade me that it is eminently possible to build majority cross-partisan support for this reform. By itself it won’t completely solve the money problem, but will bring enough improvement to give the people hope and mobilize us in a broad effort to restore government by the people.
Please subscribe to my Substack. Going forward I’ll make the case for optimism in greater detail. Please also check out our website: www.savedemocracyinamerica.org
Thanks again for engaging with me.
Couldn't agree more and love what you are doing. Keep it up!
Thank you!
The current US financial system, with the instant creation of new dollars (in the form of debt) at its root, is inherently corrupting--and over many years has been slowly, and now relatively more quickly, strangling (and/or exporting) the real economy of goods and services.
Money, new and old (or more precisely, the holders and managers thereof) is continually chasing "investment opportunities"--income streams--that can be extracted from the goods-and-services economy (or from individuals more directly, such as in taxes spent for the benefit of the financiers). That's part of how we get outrageous defense system pricing, outrageous public health costs, and other outrageous government spending. (Example: ~$1,800,000 is spent per estimated covid hospitalization prevented and ~$50,000,000 is spent per estimated covid death prevented in the 6 mos. through 4-years cohort for the CDC-recommended childhood Pfizer covid vaccine--yet the recommendation stands--and appears on every child's "vaccination schedule.")
Monopolized currency creation corrupts not just the financial system and its incentives, but society at large, including politics. (Though politics would likely be corrupt even without financial corruption, I admit.)
Fundamentally, the power of issuing new *unsupported* currency should not exist--or it should be available to all--because wherever it does exist and is monopolized, corruption and oppression follow.
"For the love of money is the root of all evil: which while some coveted after, they have erred from the faith, and pierced themselves through with many sorrows." - This is the original line from the King James Bible, but interestingly it doesn't cover the sorrows inflicted upon others.
I agree but good luck getting Warren to go along with that
Those are the exceptions that prove the rule.
Sure, because every dollar buys a vote, right? How many dollars to buy yours?
You can’t mount a viable campaign for national office without raising a ton of money. So candidates self censor to avoid alienating potential donors. That’s why they have little for us beyond slogans and personal attacks on their opponents. Indirectly the need for campaign cash does massive damage, though no one is actually buying votes. Thanks for commenting.
I suggest you examine Dave Brat's success against Eric Cantor, or Ms. Ocasio-Cortez knocking off Joe Crowley.
The big payoff on campaign contributions is being able to bank them, which certainly helps not-particularly-wealthy "public servants" become millionaires over time.
OK that's two out of hundreds of races....
Examples. The majority of races aren't decided by money, but simply by incumbency.
100% agree. And how many House races are really up for grabs?
The Supreme Court would like a word.
SCOTUS could be relevant in several ways. How do you mean?
Numerous rulings on campaign contributions and this has been tested in the Supreme Court over and over.
Yes, the court has gutted almost every limit on what big donors can spend, because campaign cash supposedly is a form of free speech.
For this reason, the only path to game changing reform - short of amending the Constitution - is a public financing system that creates an alternative pool of money candidates can use without selling out to special interests.
Of the public financing mechanisms, Voter Dollars is best because it gives every voter the power that comes with campaign cash.
www.savedemocracyinamerica.org
So hire some lawyers and bring a case, pretty simple, right? I assume you would ban unions from donating and other similar groups, right?
Then he's going to want special interest groups to not independently spend, so AARP, NRA, unions - all the people that were on the Citizens United side - get shut out of the political process. Hmm, what does that leave?
Private Equity is a symptom, not the problem. Since the Global Financial Crisis,(the "GFC") the Federal Reserve has printed so much new money that they've had to invent "investment sponges" out of thin air to store it all. Hence, private equity, special-purpose acquisition corporations (SPACs), cryptocurrencies, NFTs, leveraged EFTs, thematic EFTs, the Green New Deal, the AI tech craze, etc.
Too much money created to keep an unsustainable economy afloat with the bulk of it being syphoned off by the same Wall Street playbook that created the GFC in the first place.
I don't think wall street employees will one day repend, see the error of their ways and get real jobs.
Why do you think the economy is unsustainable? Asking seriously
There are so many reasons, it would take an article, not a comment. However, some quick hits:
1. I believe the "basis trade" will trigger a liquidity crisis requiring Federal Reserve intervention to avoid a cascade of bank failures.
2. Japan and China, the two largest foreign owners of US Treasuries are dumping their holdings into the market. Japan is doing it to support the yen. China is doing it to wage war against the US dollar. In both cases, the Treasury market is being flooded with excess product
3. Due to high interest rates, Janet Yellen refinanced all notes and bonds that came due with short-term bills. Thus, Scott Bessent is now faced with refinancing $12 trillion in US debt every 30, 60 and 90 days. And having to do so in a market already being flooded with Treasuries due to #2 above. We're one failed Treasury auction away from possible default, a scenario that would cause a global depression.
4. Everyone on Wall Street wants the Fed to cut rates. However, the Fed cutting rates doesn't, in fact, cut rates. It creates money, which will then have to pursue assets, artificially driving up prices (the point of my initial post). Not only is this inflationary, it's a house of cards where value is being created from thin air.
In summary, the US economy is a juggler with too many balls in the air. Once one drops, they'll all drop.
It's also worth noting that the Biden administration cooked the books more than any other administration in recent memory. Jobs were severely overestimated, and those jobs that were created were all government jobs. The government doesn't produce anything, and only has funds that it takes from taxpayers. At the end of the Biden administration, the government was about 30% of our economy, and project to be about 50% by the end of the decade (spoiler alert: it will never get to that point, because the government will collapse long before then).
What do you think is going to happen when most people realize that they won't get medicare or social security? How they take my tax money knowing I won't be able to claim the benefit is beyond me. I'm skeptical of anything Elizabeth Warren and Ed Markey claim. Like Chuck Schumer, they always find a camera to be able to talk about how they're saving humanity. I'm not buying it. They'll probably try to pin all of this on Trump, when the truth is, it was already baked in.
At least Trump is doing *something*. It may not work, but it's better than waiting around, and hoping things get better.
My old lady's myopic eyes see Wall St (etc) as exactly like the government in that it creates nothing. The govt prints money and the financial sector moves money around to “create” profit/value. It all seems a sophisticated glory that I am too simple-minded to understand.
Not all of the financial sector "creates nothing" but I love this comment because the trends are clearly that the sectors hoovering up the most "funny money" are still gaining steam and finding new ways to screw the public - despite being clearly implicated in some of the worst fiscal behavior in modern history.
As someone who has sat on boards (both corporate and non-profit) the distinct-in-many-ways-but-also-similar pressures management faces for CONSTANT year over year growth and - where applicable - shareholder stock buy backs/profit sharing is just so clearly unsustainable.
Thank you for such a good response. You put that so well.
That's true to an extent, although "wall street" encompasses a lot of different firms of different sizes, some of which actually do provide value and service. They undergird the economy in ways the government never can...
Regarding the term ‘basis trade,’ it was unfamiliar to me until a recent Substack post from James Lavish: https://www.jameslavish.com/p/the-dangerous-hedge-fund-basis-trade . [I hope he won’t mind me quoting part of it]
“The hedge fund will buy a US Treasury and then hedge against it (sell short) a similar futures security.
“Here’s how it works: funds buy long-term Treasury bonds (say, 10-year notes yielding 4%) while shorting Treasury futures contracts tied to the same maturity.
The futures price typically trades at a slight discount to the cash bond price due to financing costs and market mechanics, creating a spread—often just 10-20 basis points (0.1%-0.2%).
This trade is dollar-neutral: profits don’t hinge on bond prices rising or falling, just the spread getting smaller.
“But the real juice comes from leverage.
“Funds borrow heavily in the repo market—where they pledge the Treasuries as collateral for short-term loans at ever-so slightly lower rates—and then amplify their positions.
With $1 billion in capital, a fund might control $10 billion to $20 billion in Treasuries at 10:1 or 20:1 leverage.
And a 15-basis-point spread on $10 billion nets $15 million annually—a 1.5% return unlevered.”
Thanks, ummm I guess 🥺. Not that I disagree, but seeing it in writing wakes me from a blissful ignorance slumber.
Yes, private equity can be rapacious, and this is an exceptionally ugly example. But time and again, PE does exactly what it claims to do: I worked at and retired from a company that benefited enormously from the infusion of PE financial and intellectual capital. It’s difficult to make the case, as the author seems implicitly to favor (and his lede suggests), that government should draw lines around industries and bar PE from them.
Instead, I take two lessons from this debacle and its possible repetition: 1) notice that the Steward hospital “conglomerate” was already struggling long before Cerberus got their fangs into it; the US medical industry struggles generally under a nightmarish burden of multi-governmental regulation, perverse third party financial incentives, and poor administration. These problems existed before Cerberus appeared on the scene. Cerberus did not cause these problems, but they sure took advantage of them. There are many things that could be done to improve the efficacy and financial sustainability of medical providers, especially regional and rural hospitals, and none of them have anything to do with getting rid of PE.
And 2) this is *another* example of the need to simplify the US tax code, strip it to the bare essence of revenue generation, and get out of the special interests games. Money follows opportunity, and our lazy, not very bright, and easily bought legislators have been all too happy to make tax arbitrage more important than value creation. Remove the arbitrage incentives that riddle the IRC and state equivalents. All sorts of things will start to make more sense.
Very true. The point of investment of capital is to provide what is needed for an economy to run and thrive. Capital investment is not a charity and everyone is in this game through their ira, 401ks and 403b, not to mention their jobs which produce the capital. Gov feeds off capital it does not create anything.
A little OT, but government isn't meant to create material goods. Govt is supposed to protect the safety & functioning of the rest of society, no?
Agreed.
Agree. The parent organization had already run it into the ground. They could have used the same sell/lease back mechanism to recapitalize the system, but voted to sell out. Probably an all volunteer board that was not going to spend excess time on a problem of their own creation. So they sold to Cerberus as an easy fix and could wash their hands of the problem.
OK, but some regulation seems in order here. Healthcare is not an efficient market in so many ways, least of all when it is most needed and only one option exists in a 40 mile radius. If hospitals are running out of fairly basic life-saving supplies, maybe they should be run more like, say, an airline, with stringent regulations around safety?
Not just PE owned hospitals. Teaching university hospitals have been transformed into Money Machines in my state.
My daughter-in-law is a PA that recently started work for an equity healthcare play, not a hospital but a multi-practice mini-conglomerate. I'm still puzzled that doctors will sell off their practices and become employees of the company they sold to - but apparently they are. Locally to me, everything has become corporatized - my own primary care is now part of a state-wide "system" (even though not PE).
Older physicians are looking for an exit strategy from a long held practice, most younger physicians now have an enormous amount of educational debt and no way to buy into a practice. There is also little appetite to run a medical practice as the overhead/compliance expense can easily exceed 60% of revenue. Not to mention thetime required to run a practice and the lack of business education that physicians receive. The PE offer is often the best lump sum payment option available. The contract typically requires 2 to 5 years of continued employment at the practice, as the “good will
“ of the original physicians is the biggest asset in the sale. For any older physicians, this is the opportunity that exists.
Physicians use to be entrepreneurs. Now, especially the younger generation want steady paychecks and predictable hours. They would rather have a boss than work weekends
It costs a great deal of money today to set up a successful private practice. Most young physicians simply don’t have the cash, and many say they want to practice medicine and have some free time, rather than running a business.
Same pay after a million + buyout?
I am sure a lot of them take it, and it gives them an exit when the time comes.
The hospitals should have mortgaged their real estate and used it for the betterment of its institution.
But community hospitals have weakened and disappeared for a much bigger reason - the socialization of medicine when Medicare and Medicaid were created.
Before then, medical care wasn’t a financial backbreaker. Religious institutions sponsored many of the hospitals. Think, for example, in NYC Presbyterian Hospital, Mt. Sinai, St. Vincent’s and many more.
But Medicare/Medicaid became mandatory customers - they passed a law saying people couldn’t be denied care based upon inability to pay without creating any reimbursement mechanism. It’s like if you owned a grocery store and had to give away groceries without foodstamps or snap cards that pay you back 100 cents.
With Medicare and Medicaid, they don’t pay 100 cents.
So someone has to pay.
I had a hip replacement a few years ago and went out of network at my doctor’s recommendation. My insurer only paid $1,800 or so - they, like most other plans based on out of network reimbursements on the reimbursement rate established for the zip code where the service is provided.
The only person who would remove a hip for $1,800 works in the meat department of your local supermarket. My surgeon’s fee was $10,000.
A financially healthy hospital gets about 30% or so of its revenue from private pay patients. Mostly insurance and cash pay patients.
Those two non-governmental payers have to make up the shortfall. I paid my $8,200.
Insurers who control huge flows of patients can negotiate lower rates than the “book” rate. But it’s still way higher than the Medicare/Medicaid reimbursement. So all of you who pay health insurance premiums are paying a hidden tax.
So much for not taxing the middle class…..
Medicare itself is a scam.
When it started in 1965, the highest anyone had to pay annually in Medicare FICA payments was $27.10 a YEAR. Retirees were automatically grandfathered in and got lifetime retirement health benefits without having paid in a dime. Those working but halfway there got full coverage.
And it slowly went up, before it exploded under Clinton in 1994 when the Medicare wage cap was eliminated.
Here’s an extreme example of how crazy it’s gotten….Juan Soto, a 26 year old who makes $51 million together with his employer pays nearly $1.5 million a year for retirement health insurance that he can’t use for 40 years - even while he pays his current year insurance policy.
It is the cost shifting that has made health care so expensive for the average person. And it is Medicare and Medicaid that have destroyed hospitals.
"They" wanted to replace my hip 12 years ago. I got an antique hand-me-down cane instead. I'm 87, doing just fine, no assisted care, no maid, no cook, drive to the grocery, do my shopping, eat very well. Medical services are a joke, no price list. My auto mechanic and butcher are honest. Hey, thanks for that tip about the butcher. $1,800, huh? Not bad. To copy the late, great jack Benny, "I'm thinking it over."
Now do a story on the compensation of top executives of non-profit health care organizations. Non-profit organizations can't pay a return to owners, but some employees do very well.
Okay, here's a summary of how the UPMC CEO salary has changed over time, based on the info I found:
* **Jeffrey Romoff (Former CEO, retired in 2021):**
* **2009:** $4.01 million (salary, bonuses, and benefits) [^1]
* **2010:** $5.97 million (total compensation) [^2]
* **2019:** $9.5 million [^3]
* **2020:** $10.4 million [^4]
* **2021:** $10,387,010 [^5]
* **2022:** $12,880,205 (as former CEO) [^6]
* **2023:** $17,886,701 (as former CEO) [^7][^8]; also reported as almost $18 million [^9]
* **Leslie Davis (Current CEO):**
* **2022:** $4,211,830 (as SVP and COO) [^6]
* **2023:** $11,314,762 [^7][^8]; also reported as over $11 million [^9]
So, it looks like Romoff's compensation generally increased over the years, even after his retirement, and Davis's compensation also significantly increased when she took over as CEO.
[^1]: [UPMC CEO Jeffrey Romoff Earns Twice as Much as West Penn...](https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/compensation-issues/upmc-ceo-jeffrey-romoff-earns-twice-as-much-as-west-penn-allegheny-ceo/#:~:text=Jeffrey%20Romoff%2C,Post-Gazette%20report.)
[^2]: [22 UPMC Executives, Physicians Earn More Than...](https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/compensation-issues/22-upmc-executives-physicians-earn-more-than-1m/#:~:text=Twenty-two%20executives,total%20compensation.)
[^3]: [triblive.com/business/records-upmc-ceo-jeffrey-romoff-made-9-5m-in...](https://triblive.com/business/records-upmc-ceo-jeffrey-romoff-made-9-5m-in-2019-pay-tops-1m-for-32-employees/#:~:text=UPMC%20CEO,2019%20pay)
[^4]: [Former UPMC CEO Jeffrey Romoff made $10.4M in 2020, IRS ...](https://triblive.com/local/former-upmc-ceo-romoff-made-10-4m-in-2020-irs-records-show/#:~:text=Former%20UPMC,about%20%24900000)
[^5]: [Executive Compensation at UPMC (2021) - Paddock Post](https://paddockpost.com/2024/03/12/executive-compensation-at-upmc-2021/#:~:text=At%20year-end%2C,and%20CEO)
[^6]: [Executive Compensation at UPMC (2022) - Paddock Post](https://paddockpost.com/2024/03/14/executive-compensation-at-upmc-2022/#:~:text=%2412%2C880%2C205%3A%20Jeffrey,3%2C981%2C291%3A%20Diane)
[^7]: [Executive Compensation at UPMC (Pittsburgh) 2023 | Paddock Post](https://paddockpost.com/2024/12/08/executive-compensation-at-upmc-pittsburgh-2023/#:~:text=%2411%2C314%2C762%3A%20Leslie,Shapiro%2C%20UPM)
[^8]: [25 Employees of UPMC Receive $435 Million in Compensation](https://paddockpost.com/2024/12/10/25-employees-of-upmc-receive-435-million-in-compensation/#:~:text=77%2C356%20employees,and%20CEO)
[^9]: [UPMC Jet | Pennsylvania United](https://paunited.org/upmcexecsflyinghigh/#:~:text=UPMC%20EXECUTIVE,in%202023.)
**from Google Gemini AI**
Yes, ours made millions a year on the backs of the nursing and ancillary staff, always cutting, cutting, cutting.
Here is where universal health care paid for by your tax dollars might make a lot more sense. Non-profit and no more vampire squids sucking every last dollar out for private gain. I live in Canada and yes the quality of care can be less than desirable and we certainly have issues of inadequate funding resulting in long wait times for everything but sure beats this nonsense.
What we have clearly isn’t working, but there is no sane person who can advocate for turning more of the healthcare system over to the federal government. I really don’t know what the fix is going to be.
The fix is to be healthier, and provide more low cost access like the Doc in a box model. Blood tests are cheap and readily available and they give you the results with comparisons to healthy results. You don't need to even see a doctor to get a blood test and the results are pretty easy to understand.
That’s probably how it will evolve. I notice in my own case I try to avoid doctors and hospitals, if I can. If enough people get pushed the same way, the demand changes, so naturally the type of services and costs change, too. Taking care of your own health better would be a key factor.
Same here but it shouldn’t require a doctorate in navigating a broken system to get normal healthcare. Grandma Average can’t find her way through the maze of a broken system and that’s not ok.
Oh, what I thought you were going to say is, "What we have ... 'here is a failure to communicate.'"
"Some men, you just can't reach."
I think the fix is to remove barriers to the market, and also to reconnect payment with consumption.
The problem is our culture. What does the government provide efficiently? VA health care? We all need to take more responsibility for our own health.
Yes, with a healthy dose of reality about life and longevity and health.
My mother lived to be 101 in a small town in Canada. She had superb care her entire life. I've heard complaining about Canadian health care, but I never observed any problems in her case or those of her friends. When she was 95 she suffered a broken hip late Christmas Eve. The local surgeon came in Christmas Day and gave her a new tip.
It’s a real problem now. Lots of Canadians come to thenUS for care due to long waiting lists
For a 95 year old to survive hip surgery is quite impressive.
Thanks for the illuminating article Matt. Very sad indeed (but not surprising). Never thought the day would come that I would agree with Elizabeth Warren, but then again I won’t hold my breath for her and Mark to get anywhere on this.
I used to agree with Elizabeth Warren a lot. Then she decided to enter politics...
I used to agree with Warren until she wasn't an Indian any more
Cerberus in Greek mythology is the 3-headed hound that guarded the entrance to Hades.
...and made sure no one ever got out again.
I don't know which notion is more flabbergasting: That anyone (ESPECIALLY an outfit meant to save people from the jaws of death!) would trust them, or that they thought it was a good idea to name themselves that to begin with.
This is the definitional sign of our times, society wide. Anywhere I look I see a now common transgressional violation of what were formerly taken as boundary norms, now pushing egregiously to the point of grotesquerie against our limits of honor, of self-respect, and yes, the essence of 'love' itself, in a meme-like, staring into the mirror quality of "At last, at long last, have you no decency, sir?"
How can we not hear the sirens, see the multi-hued flashing lights, even the moans of the victims from behind the camouflage of rationalization "becuz profit" behind this thus far implacable and relentless, teeth-gnashing loss of self respect as we witness our overwhelming by the utter wretchedness of these perpetrators of society's own core self-destruction?
Fortunately, in a mostly free society with a mostly free market, you and others who agree are free to create your own alternative system.
Just another example of how the entire western medical establishment is imploding.
That was/is an horrendous situation, but ask yourself what would have happened had Cerberus not purchased those struggling hospitals. They would still have gone bankrupt, just 11 years earlier. Were there other buyers at the time, ready to bail them out? I truly don't know, but I doubt it.
My own limited experience is that hospitals are usually poorly managed, whether they are for profit or not. And I don't know what the solution is, but I don't believe that banning private equity purchases is going to advance quality care in US hospitals.
I worked in the healthcare industry from 1994 - 2005. I saw the industry change during this time. We were lucky in that we had multiple hospitals within a 40 mile radius. These hospitals used to be known for specializing in maybe 1 or 2 areas each so as not to compete with neighboring hospitals. Then came the MBAs who changed the mind set to we should offer every specialty and squash the other hospitals (even though they didn't have the patient base to justify the cost).
Oh, and our state had a government" oversight" agency that was supposed to monitor hospitals and not allow them to get programs where their patient base didn't warrant the cost. Well, more often than not programs got implemented once the $300,000 was paid to the agency.
Single site community hospitals just don’t have the scale of operations and customer base to support all the specialties and associated costs. As medical tech expands that trend becomes more pronounced. It is a really hard business and the bigger not for profit chains have obviously focused on consolidating with the best community hospitals instead of the least attractive.
That is not to say that this case is free from criticism. But the underlying financial issue isn’t the ownership model.
Rural hospitals also have a higher percentage of Medicare and Medicaid patients which, as another commenter pointed out, reimburse at rates that are below cost. As the hospital doesn't have enough private insurance patients to make up the difference, it ends up squeezed into insolvency.
There is a problem here, but it would be crazy to expect Warren and Markey to make things better. The real targets of their exploitation of the issue will be elsewhere.
Warren and Markey could have joined the MAHA movement, supported Kennedy and the other appointees in reforming healthcare, but their concerns stop at political boundaries.
Exactly. The common political playbook begins with an attention grabbing title for a bill. This will become the main marketing headline. Then the actual work of negotiating the pork allotments begins. The bill, which by the time of a vote is anything but what it's title implies, is simply a stealth vehicle used to camouflage the politicians' pay outs to their loyal donors.
Terrible stories and believable in every way. Glad to be retired from internal medicine after several decades of seeing the degradation of medicine, in all manner possible. I just could not stand it any more. Lizzie whines a lot and wags her finger pretending to be bitter, but she’ll never lift a hand to help this situation. She talks big, though. Sickening. And even more sickening, is that so many simpletons still believe her!
Not for profit healthcare systems aren’t any better. They grift a different way by not paying taxes in the towns they operate. Not for profit seems like noble cause in medicine. It’s not. All that means is at the end of the year there’s zero profits. That doesn’t mean the presidents of these companies isn’t getting paid handsomely plus the bonus they get to make sure that zero comes up in the profit margin. Our hospital in town has purchased every house surrounding the actual hospital in case it wishes to expand in the future and we are talking streets of houses that have now been taken off the property tax rolls. Ethical? I think not.
I've said it before and will say it again: "Not for profit" is a tax status, not a business model.
Thanks for this story! More Americans should know about the depredations of private equity. I'd venture to say the vast majority don't know anything about PE, not even the people who work for companies owned by PE. I worked for a venerable old company for 15 years that was destroyed by PE and none of us had a clue as to the nature of the beast that owned us. Not once did we meet anyone from the firm; they existed at a safe distance from us.
How did your company come to be owned by PE?
It was some time ago, but if memory serves me correctly, our parent company at the time, fell into debt over a real estate deal gone wrong and sold us to pay for the debt.