🦔Private equity owns 447 US hospitals. ER deaths rose 13% under PE ownership, per the Annals of Internal Medicine. Preventable adverse events jumped 25% after PE acquisition, per JAMA. Hospital assets fell an average of 24% within two years of a PE buyout, about $28 million per hospital that just disappeared. PE firms account for 7% of GDP but were behind 21% of all healthcare bankruptcies in 2024. Steward Health Care, once the largest private for-profit hospital system in the country, closed its safety net hospitals and went bankrupt. Twenty-five states have introduced 79 bills to address PE ownership of hospitals. My Take PE firms buy hospitals the same way they buy retail chains. Load them with debt, strip the assets, extract fees, and move on. The difference is when Eddie Bauer closes you find another jacket. When your hospital closes, the nearest ER is 45 minutes away and a stroke patient doesn't have 45 minutes. They buy the building, sell the land underneath it in a sale-leaseback, then bill the hospital rent on property it used to own. The debt payments eat whatever revenue is left. $28 million per hospital gone in two years while ER deaths climb 13% and infections double. Federal Medicaid cuts are projected to pull roughly $1 trillion out of the system over the next decade. These hospitals already run on margins so thin that one bad quarter can force a closure. I don't know how the ones still under PE ownership survive what's coming, and the communities that depend on them don't have a backup plan. Hedgie🤗