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Comment by lordleft | Hacker News Reader

The market really is the greatest mechanism for laundering morally reprehensible processes, isn't it? I find that many people struggle to find the vocabulary or concepts to denounce this kind of outcome because it occurs through market forces.

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When it's public health care given to everyone equally: Death Panels

When it's private healthcare given to those who can afford it: Efficiency

I’d rather these hard decisions be made by public officials. It’s more ethical to make treatment of the sick and elderly a public affair and not a for profit industry.

Totally agreed; I'm pointing out the ridiculous framing of the issue.

Yeah if instead of "PE" you had to say "I take out a massive loan to buy a business collateralized against itself, saddle the business with the debt, take money out of the company to pay myself, and then ruthlessly cut quality in the business to make short term profits look higher to resell the business (and the bank is happy to finance this because they get paid first if the business goes bankrupt)" it feels like it would be a lot harder to come across as legitimate

Late stage capitalism?

That term is more a reference to globalism, consumerism, multinationals, wealth inequality, etc. It's been overused by the public to mean "anything I don't like that has some tentative link to capitalism"

Surely a component of late stage capitalism is the accumulation of wealth leading to anti-competitive practices, in this case resulting in degradation of quality of service. Health care in the US isn’t a competitive business therefore it’s rife for anti-consumer, profit-maximizing change.

But you can have all those things without late-stage capitalism - and private equity predates late-stage capitalism. So saying "it's because of late-stage capitalism" is like saying "it's because of democracy". The private equity is happening within a democracy and late-stage capitalist system, but these are correlations, not causations.

Ah I see your point

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