" The Gilded Age of Medicine is Here ," announced the title of a recent New Yorker article about the tactics of private equity firms that provide infusions of cash to struggling hospitals in order to extract hundreds of millions of dollars in profits by slashing costs to the bone and endangering the health of patients. As Dr. Dhruv Khullar writes, "They [private equity] are hardly the only corporations to learn this lesson. Increasingly, health insurers, private hospitals, and even nonprofits are behaving as though they aim first to extract revenue, and only second to care for people. People often are viewed less as humans in need of care than consumers who generate profit." Dr. Don Berwick's dire warning about the existential threat of greed on the failing American health care system seems to be coming true, to the extent that the brazen assassination of an insurance company executive in midtown Manhattan elicited far more outrage about delayed or denied car...
