P Ades

iowan living in the ATL and doing my daytime legal gig waiting to win the lottery

[Anonymous @YourAnonNews]

Because our daddies never owned a fucking emerald mine. No billionaire creates billions alone. That's the myth. Wealth is built collectively and owned privately. One gets paid a wage and the other gets credited for the work of an entire organization.

[Felix Prehn 🐶 @felixprehn]

Private equity firms bought 500 hospitals. Death rates in their emergency rooms went up 13%. They fired 12% of the staff. Then they paid themselves billions in dividends.

A Harvard study just confirmed what doctors already knew: people are dying so investors can hit quarterly targets.

Exactly what happens. A PE firm buys a hospital using debt. The debt gets placed on the hospital's balance sheet, not the firm's. Now the hospital owes hundreds of millions it never borrowed. To service that debt, the hospital cuts costs. Costs mean nurses.

The numbers from the Harvard/University of Chicago study are horrifying. After PE acquisition, emergency department salary spending dropped 18.2%. ICU salary spending dropped 15.9%. Hospital-wide employees were cut 11.6%. Emergency department deaths rose 13%, seven additional deaths per 10,000 visits.

A separate study found patients undergoing surgery at PE-acquired hospitals had 17% higher odds of dying within 90 days.

Steward Health Care, owned by Cerberus Capital, filed bankruptcy with $9 billion in debt after closing hospitals across Massachusetts. The CEO lived on a $40 million yacht while emergency rooms went dark. Eight hospitals serving 2 million people nearly disappeared because a PE fund extracted more cash than the system could survive.

The private equity industry has poured over $1 trillion into healthcare. They operate a quarter of ERs nationwide. This isn't going away.

The investing angle nobody talks about.

Non-PE hospital operators like HCA Healthcare (HCA) and Tenet (THC) are the direct beneficiaries. Every time a PE hospital closes or deteriorates, patients flow to the nearest competitor. HCA has returned 1,200% since 2011. Patient volume from PE closures is a structural tailwind nobody's pricing in.

Medical staffing firms (AMN Healthcare, Cross Country) charge premium rates specifically because PE hospitals cut staff. The staffing shortage IS the business model for these companies.

The disruption play: outpatient surgical centers (SCA Health, now part of UnitedHealth) are pulling profitable procedures out of hospitals entirely. PE-owned hospitals lose their highest-margin surgeries to outpatient, and the death spiral accelerates.

Pull up tradevision and monitor healthcare M&A alerts, hospital closure filings, and patient volume migration data. When a PE-owned hospital announces "restructuring," the patient volume shift to competitors like HCA starts within 30 days. That 30-day window is when the competitor's earnings revisions haven't updated yet. Free to try.

(a private equity firm bought your local hospital. borrowed $500 million in the hospital's name. fired 12% of the nurses. emergency room deaths rose 13%. then they paid themselves dividends. nobody went to prison. they're currently buying another hospital.)

[Mark Cuban @mcuban]

Congressional advisers call to rein in Medicare Advantage spending amid industry pressure

I’ll summarize for you.

EVERY SINGLE FAMILY IN THE USA IS PAYING $800 A YEAR to the big insurance companies because taxpayers pay them more than it costs to support Trad Medicare

That’s insane. And it doesn’t even include the increased premiums trad medicare plan holders have to spend.

Medicare Advantage was meant to cost LESS than trad Medicare. Yet here we are

Support the Break Up Big Medicine bill from @HawleyMO and @SenWarren

If your representative is up for election in Nov and they don’t support this bill. Don’t vote for them. They support higher healthcare costs. To reduce healthcare costs, this bill is the most direct path

https://t.co/GD8rfn0ySy via @statnews

[Rep. Pramila Jayapal @RepJayapal]

$11.3 billion on war for Iran, but tell me again how we don’t have enough money for health care.

[Mike Levin @MikeLevin]

The MAHA agenda is a fraud. Trump’s EPA is suppressing its own scientific findings on forever chemicals, rolling back drinking water standards, and exempting importers from disclosing which toxic chemicals are entering the country.

The cumulative effect is diminished transparency, weakened protections, and greater exposure for American families, especially children.

This isn’t a public health agenda.

It’s a chemical industry protection racket.
https://t.co/tV80L0I9bl

[NBC News @NBCNews]

About 1 in 3 U.S. adults say they’ve made trade-offs to afford health care in the past year, including rationing or skipping medications or borrowing money, according to a poll from West Health-Gallup. https://t.co/ALaG8LjqHO

[Elizabeth Warren @SenWarren]

Instead of going to war with Iran, we could cover health care for millions of Americans.

And still have $20 billion left over.

[Rev. Benjamin Cremer @Brcremer]

Beware of any Christian movement that demands the government be an instrument of God's wrath but never a source of God's charity, mercy, or compassion.

[Senator Reverend Raphael Warnock @SenatorWarnock]

A country that always finds money for bombs but won’t feed hungry children at home is spiritually broken.

[Sen. Bernie Sanders @SenSanders]

Mark Zuckerberg is building a data center in Louisiana that will use 3x more electricity than all of New Orleans.

Oligarchs want YOU to pay for these data centers with higher water & electric bills.

Americans must fight back against billionaires who put profits over people.

[P Ades @plades]

@DMACCsoftball Way to go, Erin!

[Rev. Benjamin Cremer @Brcremer]

A Christianity that causes the hungry to go without food, the sick to go without healthcare, the stranger to be mistreated, and God’s creation to be ravaged, all while the greedy and cruel satisfy their every desire, is a Christianity that can no longer claim to follow Christ.

[Robert Reich @RBReich]

Still waiting for it to trickle down...

[P Ades @plades]

https://t.co/tYvJkvWnth

[P Ades @plades]

https://t.co/L0VHe5CLV1

[P Ades @plades]

ATTHelp unfortunately provided me nothing more than scripted platitudes, i.e., a virtual "there there" pat on the back. Sadly I didn't receive actual additional information or assistance, but, hey, I guess I got to vent...

[P Ades @plades]

You're killing me @ATT with my internet being down since midday Friday. Time to fix keeps getting pushed off, and no one worked on it this weekend. It's a whole neighborhood without TV, security, etc. Hotspot suggestion works OK for one computer. I'm sorely disappointed!

[Maria Cardona @MariaTCardona]

So. Very . Gross. While Trump & Republicans strip healthcare from millions of Americans, while they cruelly separate families traumatizing American children, while they slash cancer research and impose tariffs skyrocketing the costs of groceries, gas and rent for working every day Americans, Trump, in all of his vulgar glory, shows off how he has cheapened the Oval Office and reduced it to a sideshow accessible to the highest bidder!

[Alex Cole @acnewsitics]

MAGA Farmers screwed by trade wars. Americans are paying more at checkout. Families losing healthcare.

Trump: “Look how shiny my office is.”

[Dr. Annie Andrews @AnnieAndrewsMD]

Did we all take organic chemistry & the MCAT & miss the social part of our early 20’s and work 80 hours a week for 3+ years for the brain worm guy who doesn’t know what a p-value is to destroy our nation’s public health system? No.

Time to lean into our expertise and speak up.