The Private Equity Firms That Gobble Up Hospitals and Spit Them Out

The New Republic: “Looking to turn a quick profit, the firms buy medical facilities and then unload them just a few years later, often leaving devastation in their wake…For roughly the past 20 years, private equity firms have been on a buying spree of health care businesses, like hospitals, surgical centers, physician practices, nursing homes, rehabilitation facilities and hospices. According to the nonprofit Private Equity Stakeholder Project, which uses Centers for Medicare and Medicaid data, about 488 U.S. hospitals are currently owned by private equity, more than 22 percent of all for-profit hospitals. A study in Health Affairs found that the number of private equity–controlled physician practices increased from 816 in 2012 to 5,779 in 2021. Because private equity acquisitions are not always transparent, and because our health care system is decentralized and fragmented, researchers and regulators have only recently quantified the full cost of this immense and ongoing shift. What they’ve found is frightening. A 2023 study in the Journal of the American Medical Association compared private-equity held hospitals with other for-profit hospitals and found a 25 percent increase in preventable adverse events at private equity hospitals—like a 38 percent increase in central line bloodstream infections and doubling of surgical site infections. A 2025 study in the Annals of Internal Medicine found that when private equity bought a hospital it tended to cut staffing and salaries; there was a corresponding 13 percent increase in emergency room deaths.