mostlysignssomeportents:

mostlysignssomeportents:
mostlysignssomeportents:
covidconsciouspdx:
mostlysignssomeportents:
Oregon bans the corporate practice of medicine
ALT
I’m in the home stretch of my 20+ city book tour for my new novel PICKS AND SHOVELS. Catch me in PDX TODAY (June 20) at BARNES AND NOBLE with BUNNIE HUANG and at the TUALATIN public library on SUNDAY (June 22). After that, it’s LONDON (July 1) with TRASHFUTURE’S RILEY QUINN and then a big finish in MANCHESTER on July 2.
Private equity firms are the demon princes of the hellspace that is the imploding, life-destroying, plutocrat-generating American economy. Their favorite scam, the “leveraged buyout” is a mafia bustout dressed up in respectable clothes, and if you mourn a beloved, failed business, chances are that an LBO was the murder weapon, and PE was the killer:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/23/spineless/#invertebrates
(Despite simplistic explanations and bad-faith apologestics, a leveraged buyout is nothing like a mortgage – it is a sinister, complex, destructive form of financial fraud:)
https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/05/rugged-individuals/#misleading-by-analogy
As bad as this is, it’s ten quintillion times worse when applied to healthcare. When PE buys your hospital, people die. A lot of people:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/28/5000-bats/#charnel-house
PE doesn’t even have to buy the whole hospital – for a long time, PE groups bought out anesthetist practices affilated with hospitals and pulled them out of the hospital’s insurance affiliation. Unsuspecting patients who went in for routine surgical care at a hospital that was in-network for their insurer would get a rude awakening from their sedation: “surprise bills” running to tens or hundred of thousands of dollars. PE groups did the same thing with emergency rooms, so that people experiencing serious medical emergencies who had the presence of mind to insist upon being brought to an in-network ER nevertheless got hit with life-ruining surprise bills:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/03/14/unhealthy-finances/#steins-law
Donald Trump sometimes panders to anti-elitist elements in his base by threatening the private equity racket. For example, Trump has frequently railed against the “carried interest” tax loophole that allows PE bosses to pay half as much tax as you or I would on their vast takings. “Carried interest” is a tax law that gave 16th century sea-captains a break on their “interest” in the cargo they “carried.” It is both weird and fantastically unjust that richest, worst financiers in America are able to take advantage of this Moby Dick-ass-law:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/29/writers-must-be-paid/#carried-interest
But while Trump sometimes talks a good line about fighting private equity looters, he does not, has not, and will not lift a finger to them. He dares not. The carried interest tax scam is preserved in the Big Beautiful Bill, joined with many other giveaways the least productive, most guillotineable looters America has produced:
https://www.pillsburylaw.com/en/news-and-insights/no-changes-carried-interest-big-beautiful-bill-so-far.html
Working people cannot rely on Trump’s federal government and the Republican Congress to protect us from these vampires. But this is America: when the feds fail, that creates an opportunity for state legislators to step in and act. And that’s just what’s happened in Oregon, where the state legislature has passed sweeping, bipartisan legislation that bans corporations from owning or operating a medical practice in the state:
https://prospect.org/health/2025-06-13-united-health-care-oregon-corporate-medicine/
This is called the “corporate practice of medicine” (CPOM) and it’s already banned. The American Medical Association has a longstanding, absolute prohibition on medical practices that are run by anyone except a doctor. Oregon has had a CPOM ban on the law-books since 1947. Private equity meets this prohibition with a very transparent ruse indeed: they get a “rent a doc,” often out of state, to serve as the nominal owner of their practices, and the doctor takes orders from the PE firm, and hires the PE firm’s outsource agencies to actually operate the clinic or hospital, absorbing the entirety of the practice’s profits.
Keep reading
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