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Now, then, that bailout picture looks a bit different. An industry group led by a private, equity-owned megafirm says they need $3.6 billion to survive the current health emergency. But that megafirm, in turn, is owned by two multibillionaires who made some chunk of those billions in part by taking advantage of this nation’s predatory healthcare policies to stick patients and insurance companies with hugely inflated “surprise billing” charges. Now everything has gone to hell, at least for the moment, and those same predatory capitalists are asking that taxpayers pay them $3.6 billion, lest they have to slash healthcare workers’ pay even more than has already taken place.
Here’s a thought. How about the two men worth over $11 billion between them simply bail out their own firm and the entire industry themselves.
The private equity markets continue to be a place of unabashed piracy. From the vulture capitalists of Romney ilk to the groups specifically buying up smaller firms so as to best dominate in specific industries most conducive to predatory pricing, aka Envision, the entire premise of many groups is to find segments of the market that can be exploited. They exploit them, then toss the remains aside after it all goes to hell.
One might presume that the heady profits of exploitative behavior would line private equity wallets to an extent allowing them to shoulder unexpected bad times, the whole premise of “high-risk” ventures justifying “high rewards” when they work out, but no. No, it genuinely never seems to happen that way, at least not in the last four decades. When times are good the predators, whether banks or private firms, make off with billions. When times are bad, the same firms warn that the government shall cover their losses or entire industries will be lost, and the country will be left in ruin.
But there’s an alternative here, and the alternative is for “capitalism” to suffer the consequences of “capitalism.” Two men, alone, could keep the emergency room doctors of America afloat to the tune of $3.6 billion and it would not substantively alter their lavish multibillionaire lifestyles in any goddamn way. There is no yacht they would suddenly not be able to afford. There is no second, fourth or eleventh home they could not still purchase. It would be the mere pushing of a few numbers around, and America’s most-needed healthcare workers would be assured of being paid for their heroism.
Because that, one presumes, is how the billions of dollars of profit-taking was justified: because at some point the profits might turn into losses. At some point those that sucked so much of the world’s wealth into their own pockets might need to write a check or two, and woe unto the rest of us if they cannot do so.
There is another alternative, of course. If Envision cannot absorb the current losses and emergency rooms nationwide are endangered as a result, Envision can be nationalized. It would be preeminently logical. It is a critical industry, one that is vital to the public health. It is criminal for it to be profit-driven in the first place; it would be doubly criminal if profit concerns slashed health care during a pandemic, killing Americans in the process.
Sorry you buccaneered your business right into the ground, Envision, but that’s on you. Perhaps the new owners will be more competent.
There are certainly long conversations to be had, after this is all over, about the mostly fictional stories the business networks sell to us about “capitalism,” by which they appear to mean a system in which the poor prop up the rich by bankrolling every new trip to the casino, with the rich keeping the wins and walking away from the losses. In the midst of an emergency, however, things are simpler. The proper thing to do is make sure every American can survive, with food money and rent money and medical care, which of necessity keeps all of the absolutely essential parts of the American economy automagically afloat with no legislative complexity or regulatory knot-tying. The money will “trickle up” to the deserving; landlords will be paid, landlords’ banks will be paid, and so forth. We could pay every electric bill, and every water bill.
For ancillary services, more complex measures are needed, a sort of economic stay-in-place or holding pattern that allows such bits of Americana as privately owned movie theaters, for example, to stay afloat. America’s Main Streets have been put in mothballs, awaiting a reopening; we want to make sure those streets are not wastelands of boarded-up windows and empty shops when the shelter-in-place orders are lifted.
At the top of the food chain, though, among megafirms who may now have to eat their losses for investments intended to put themselves in position to drain a few more drops of economic blood from the general public than their predecessors dared even try—no. Anyone who deems themselves worthy of a private jet should be clever enough to pack their own parachute. The definition of “capitalism” is certainly unclear, these last few decades, but it is clear that it at least means that.
America should pay the emergency room doctors directly. That is fine. The private equity firms who have twisted the healthcare system into knots, trying to wring out every last drop from the rest of the system, however, are not essential. They can wait their turn. The lobby is crowded; not every patient can be seen at once.
