Private equity didn't. People did. We really need to get rid of limited liability and corporate fictions.
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I’ll generally defend PE. But when it comes to healthcare, private ownership and leverage are just a bad mix.
People created limited liability and private equity. Fiction is not something you get rid off. Its something you live with. It is a permanent side effect of how the over rated Humam Brain works. The brain makes predictions over multiple time horizons. When there are contradictions between these predictions how is the 3 inch chimp brain supposed to handle it while not splitting? Make up a story for the sake of coherence. Everyone is doing it everyday. They are all making up fictions to handle unpredictability.
There are a finite number of legislative girders underpinning the judicial capacity to support these fictions. When they're removed, it will not be legally possible to maintain them. They are not a product of nature, they are a product of real humans, and as such are subject to human change and intervention. They are among the least durable constructs we interact with.
The intentions may be good but that's unlikely to happen in our lifetime.
What might be a more feasible solution?
Revoke corporate charters. Prevent and break up consolidation.
All corporate entities require a registration to operate in a state if they have a physical presence.
In this instance, you can also pass a law along the lines of "After setup, all care homes are required to spend 90/95/99% of their income on direct care of the residents or your charter gets revoked." This would prevent the incentives to buy them in the first place.
Get private equity out of healthcare.
It could happen this year; legislatures just need to pass laws. The hardest part is people posting comments like yours as a diversion from doing real work (though there are other hard parts too).
that's right! if only I wasnt posting snarky crap on HN we'd have a Utopia. Paging Upton Sinclair!
We each have power, influence, and responsibility. You're spending yours on cleverness, and wasting others by shifting the focus and undermining their efforts. Cleverness, in the end, doesn't matter.
> Upton Sinclair
Upton Sinclair didn't waste it.
i certainly don't want to use my cleverness for power or influence, no thank you.
I'm not talking about being power hungry, but pulling our weights in the world.
You say all it takes is for the legislature to pass the laws and seem to assume our government is functioning as expected without any bugs.
And yet we’re talking about an extremely well-connected and powerful industry in PE. Do you really think they won’t lobby intensely against legislation that would cripple their profits? Are the majority of our legislators really immune from considering corporate interests?
That's always been true, bugs and lobbyists, and yet our predecessors have gotten a lot done. People get things done now (including people you don't agree with).
It's not a fairy tale; it is hard; and yet our predecessors moved mountains.
It's the same as it's always been and yet it's different.
The political environment we live in today is not what it was even a few years ago let alone decades.
It is what we make it. The problem is a victim mentality - giving others the power (for example, to define the political environment), which also absolves the 'victim' of responsibility: they're powerless!
I find it interesting that you assume ill intent as the default when I was genuinely asking for actionable steps we could take to address a very real problem.
Perhaps consider giving people the benefit of the doubt instead of projecting your cynicism onto others.
Don’t require states to uniformly respect limited liability granted in other states. Allow them to add limits, requirements, etc. let the different states explore the trade off.
Oof, talk about making compliance difficult and expensive if a company has 50 different sets of regulations to comply with to do business in the US.
Do you believe that states are the laboratories of democracy, and have rights, or do you believe that reducing the cost of regulatory compliance is a more important goal?
I take no position on this currently, but it's an important question that deserves a serious answer. Trading off the costs of "state experimentation" and "enforced regulatory conformity" is non-trivial to do.
multi-generational households
The reality of most multi-generational households is that the wife is eventually coerced into becoming an unpaid caregiver for elderly parents (who often constantly criticize how the household is managed). This sort of "worked" in traditional societies when women didn't have other options but when they're educated and have their own careers it usually doesn't seem like such an attractive choice anymore.
I'm not opposed to multi-generational households and I have friends who have made it work well. Let's just not assume that it can be a scalable solution.
It was never an attractive choice- people simply did not have options. In my country it was not until the 1950s that retirement homes were invented and the elderly finally got their social security (remember pensions did not exist).
I would rather have access to a suicide pod.
careful dont let private equity hear you say that
I'm more worried about Catholics and other people that want to enforce their religion on others preventing access to suicide pods.