6/29/23 Washington Post: Financiers bought up anesthesia practices, then raised prices

Some excerpts:

The multibillion-dollar private equity firm Welsh, Carson, Anderson & Stowe took less than a year to create, from scratch, Colorado’s biggest and most prominent anesthesiology practice…The company employed 330 anesthesiologists in Colorado at one point…

Typically following the same approach it took in Denver: acquiring the largest anesthesiology firm in a city and growing its reach from there, company officials said. It has issued more than $1.3 billion in dividends to its shareholders…

12 former USAP anesthesiologists cited an array of reasons for leaving.

For starters, their pay declined more than they expected, they said. The company more often required them to work shifts of more than 24 hours, physicians said. Some said they were asked to take on more than 80 hours in a week. Several said that under USAP management, they felt like interchangeable “widgets” with less control over the practice than they previously had…“Their doctors were overworked and paid below market rate for what they do,” Manchon said. “That’s why their doctors were leaving.”

My take: Private equity involvement in medicine is focused on profits not patients. That being said, most other parts of the U.S. healthcare system (hospitals, physicians, insurance companies and pharmaceutical companies) do not provide great value either.

Related blog posts:

• Private Equity in Gastroenterology & More Broadly
• Changing Business of Medicine: Private Equity
• Consolidation and Competition in Health Care