Erica Rodriguez, a research employee II, works in the new laboratory of clinical stage Biopharmaceutical Company Xencor in Pasadena, Ca. (Photo by Sarah Reingewirtz/Medianews Group/Los Angeles Daily News via Getty Images)
Medianews Group via Getty Images
Extremely left -wing political leadersMore and more often together with subsidy-seeking business entities and progressive groups, various producers in the private sector for problems that the government has created too often. Instead of constructive solutions, they swing epithets. From agricultural and energy producers to drug developers and industrial manufacturers (or other progressives from sector, their “big” name nowadays), extremists try to publicly be ashamed of innovators, investors and employers and then follow punitive measures, regardless of human and economic costs.
This irresponsible form of political theater can be seen with regard to the necessary and crucial role that capital investment plays in the current health care sector. Take the well -published case of the collapse and bankruptcy of Steward Health Care, a hospital system that had struggled financially before it was taken over by a company for private equity and then roughly incorrectly managed from 2010 to 2020. According to credible reports, the failure and painful facilitarian closures were caused by mismilitarian means. Unlawfully, those responsible are held responsible.
The scandal is endlessly emphasized in an attempt to scan the entire community for private investment. Taking isolated and horrible episodes such as this and its use as a pretext to impose criminal and regulatory penalties on the rest of the community of private investment is short-sighted and harmful to people’s health. It will essentially reduce capital to communities and stakeholders in health care that this most needs. For each example as a steward there are countless others in which private capital offered a critical lifestyle of investment and management expertise to help survive and thrive struggling health care systems.
An analysis of 2020 showed that private capital had invested $ 15 billion in hundreds of urgent care centers, which are desperately needed for patients in urban and rural areas who have been hit hard by hospital closures and shortages of first -line care providers. Research by Georgetown University shows that hospitals with private capital experience increased wages; In addition, doctors and health workers were able to spend more time with patients due to reduced administrative, legal and regulatory costs.
Likewise, a lot of medical care for primary care and specialties have shown that private equity can help manage back-office functions, while they can continue to work and deliver quality health care to their communities. The alternative to many is forced to fold their practices in gigantic health conferences that place providers, insurers, pharmacies and business intermediaries under the same bureaucratic umbrella. In most cases, patients do not like that approach and also where health care professionals do not.
The private equity industry also plays a crucial role in the status of America as the global hub of medical innovation. On average, it takes more than a decade and an investment of almost $ 3 billion to create a successful medicine. This risky effort requires a steady stream of private capital to continue new discoveries.
Private capital can help companies at an early stage, as well as university research centers that develop health products, to get in touch with large -scale pharmaceutical companies to go through the regulation process and to market their products. Between 2011 and 2022, private capital companies invested nearly $ 300 billion in more than 1,800 American Life Science companies. Continuing this level of support is crucial to keep the pipeline of medical progress open, which creates highly skilled, well -paid jobs in the process.
Americans have unparalleled access to advanced treatments. Our innovative economy, largely fed by private investments, makes this possible. In particular, a disproportionate number of new pharmaceutical patents comes from the US that this process should continue if we want to win the fight against everything, from dementia, cancer, heart disease and diabetes to countless rare diseases. It will also increase the access of health care to vulnerable national and urban populations.
Villainizing private equity is an easy and irresponsible way for links to prevent successful solutions for the important challenges being found that our health care system still bullying – many where politicians and poor business factors have created. Unfortunately, this finger -purifying, demagogical approach could stimulate poor policy decisions that ultimately limit the required investments.
That would indeed be a sick result for our future health.