skepchick: “This post contains a video, which you can also view here. You may be aware that here in the United States, we have a less than ideal healthcare system. For instance, compared to our neighbors to the north, we enjoy slightly shorter wait times for some procedures in exchange for worse coverage, higher cost, and poorer health outcomes. And to expand the picture, compared to Canada, Australia, France, Germany, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, and the UK, the United States ranks last on access to care, administrative efficiency, equity, health outcomes, and overall healthcare performance. There are many reasons why this may be, but one obvious one is that in the United States our healthcare is run by private for profit corporations with no option for single payer, despite the fact that every major poll shows that the majority of Americans think their government should guarantee health insurance for everyone. As an American, all of this is pretty depressing, but what if I told you that it could get way, way worse? Well, a study just published this week in the Journal of the American Medical Association illustrates the way that a secondary player is managing to make our healthcare system even more dystopian than the pharmaceutical industry managed on its own: private equity firms. First, let’s talk about what a private equity firm is, because the name isn’t terribly descriptive if you’re not into finance chat. Which I am not, either, by the way, so I will keep this simple and only talk about one type of private equity firm that engages in “leveraged buyouts”: in the best of all possible worlds, when a company is having trouble staying afloat or growing to their potential and needs an influx of investments, a private equity firm comes in with the necessary cash to buy the company and fix it up, allowing it to continue on or grow as needed, at which point the firm resells the company or takes it public to make a tidy profit. Everybody wins…”