Wrote Hacking Healthcare, operated/managed hospital systems, blah blah. The study being referenced here is https://doi.org/10.1001/jama.2023.23147. The conclusion of the study is that the identified set of hospitals performed worse on some key metrics, hospital acquired infections are in my opinion a pretty good bellweather of other problems. However, what they are defining as "private equity" seems to be pretty amourphous. Most of the studied hospitals were in private ownership that a lot of people would call "private equity" and then bought by different "private equity". I previously was involved in ownership and management through my company ClearHealth, of some of the facilities studied. Most people would identify that ownership as "private equity". I don't dispute that the hospitals seem to be performing worse after the ownership change (after our interests were divested in 2017-2020). As "private equity" we took over operations and management of many facilities of both public and private ownership and made them run really a lot better for both patients and owners, we were very very good at doing that.

Bottom line there are a lot of very incompetently run facilities out there, of both private, "private equity" and various form of public ownership/management.

It makes a great headline to say that a hospital can be "bought" but ownership and management of hospital systems takes a book to explain. Outside entirely vertical systems like Kaiser and even that has some complexity, hospitals are much more like medical malls than anything else. An ownership and or management company does not dictate what happens under their roofs in anything like the manner a private corporation like Coke, GE or Google would. 29 states make it outright illegal for non-licensed persons to own or manage an entity that engages in the practice or medicine. Most hospitals of any size over 100 beds involve at least dozens of seperately controled and managed entities. See "corporate practice of medicine (CPOM)" laws.

Finally I would add that measuring outcomes on an apples to apples basis is more or less an impossible thing to do. Lots of people don't like to hear that. Again something like HAI I think can be a useful general indicator as well as other measurements of preventable complications, but comparing outcomes at different facilities especially across size and location is more or less useless.