Financiers bought up anesthesia practices, then raised prices

The way anesthesia costs get offloaded onto (American) patients is nuts enough as it is...

Like, I'll absolutely grant that it's not cheap to knock people out—my friend's father growing up was an anesthesiologist assistant and he made good money doing it, which is fair enough considering it's a job where you literally hold people's lives in your hands. I don't want the guy feeding me propofol to be an underpaid grunt.

But in addition to the already-too-high healthcare costs in this country (specifically the way that those costs get passed onto patients), it sucks getting a separate anesthesiologist bill on top of whatever you paid for the procedure that warranted going under in the first place. Especially when the cost of the initial procedure was insulting to begin with.

And I don't think it's solely a matter of outpatient surgery centers using third-party anesthesia techs. A few years back I was meant to get a bronchoscopy (basically a colonoscopy for your lungs) at a prestigious local hospital, but the anesthesiologist never showed up (and they weren't gonna put a tube down my trachea while I was awake, lol) so they had to send me home. Turns out there was a scheduling snafu and the anesthesiologist who was supposed to be there never got notified that they were on duty.

How does a hospital not have in-house anesthesiologists? Are they really cutting costs by scheduling medical technicians like they're picking up shifts at Taco Bell?

Another scheme these PE groups have concocted is using their regional monopolies to force hospitals and surgery centers to pay an outrageous annual “stipend” for the “privilege” of letting them provide anesthesia. This is in addition to the traditional insurance billings mentioned in the article. However, I think (hope) we’ve reached peak PE intrusion in medicine with increased scrutiny like this article creates, coupled with laws passed to outlaw “surprise out of network billing” (a big tool they were using to boost their bottom line), and physician disillusionment as they realize they ended up working as a cog in the wheels of Walmart medicine. Medical practice is a weird market, revenues are pretty much fixed to Medicare with marginal flexibility in insurance contracts (you can’t just double what you charge), so the main way these firms extract value is through cost cutting (using their market power to pay physicians and mid level providers less, skimp on support staff, etc). Doctors, while typically not great business men, aren’t dumb and can tell when they are getting screwed. With upcoming ftc regulations to curtail noncompetes, a lot these docs can actually bail out, so hopefully private equity has had its day.

American medical system is pure gotcha capitalism and extortion with an ostensible patina of restraint. Medical shouldn't be for-profit and shouldn't be a driver of bankruptcy, but those with legislative ability are on the take from big pharma and big medical to make it even more lopsided, anti-choice, expensive, and anti-consumer. There can be no reform from within a political system that refuses to restrain itself with campaign finance reform. There isn't much hope but large scale, grassroots, nonviolent rebellion to first remedy the political operating system that is a prerequisite for enduring change on any issue that cannot be bought and undone by crooked politicians.

JnJ has a AI based anethesioligist tool which can monitor all patient data and provide exacting levels of care beyond what an anethesioligist can do.

Of course... The Drs pushed back and threatened to find alternative drugs and products if JnJ didn't relent from trying to get this tool in hospitals.

Suffice it to say.. we don't see any of them in hospitals.

People under intense pressure to make gobs of money bought up [something or other], then raised prices.

Duh.