Sungida Rashid developed severe internal bleeding after giving birth to her first child at St. Elizabeth’s Medical Center in Boston. Hospital staff desperately searched the facility for an embolism coil to stop the bleeding. There were none to be found. A vendor had repossessed the coils weeks earlier after the hospital failed to pay the invoice. She bled out the next day.
A few months later, Gilberto Melendez-Brancaccio was committed overnight at Carney Hospital following a severe mental health episode. With his oxygen at critical levels, doctors ordered that he be continuously monitored. But the facility was understaffed. Gilberto died alone that night, strapped down with velcro and struggling to breathe.
Doctors unable to locate medication to prevent an impending stroke. Facilities re-using dirty endoscopes during surgeries. What do all these horror stories have in common? They all happened in hospitals owned by private equity firms.
Private equity has invested $1 trillion in healthcare over the past decade. Today, these predatory firms own 488 hospitals across the US, and they directly administer one in four emergency rooms. Their goal is simple: buy up successful hospitals, gut their inventories and lay off staff, then sell the “flipped” facilities for massive profits.
The consequences have been nothing short of devastating. A 2023 study by Harvard Medical School found that “private equity acquisition was associated with a 25.4% increase in hospital-acquired conditions,” including a 27.3% increase in falls and a 37.7% increase in central catheter–related infections. The same study found that surgical site infections more than doubled despite an 8.1% reduction in the number of surgeries conducted.
A follow-up study in 2025 put it even more starkly: hospitals owned by private equity have 13% more deaths than similar hospitals not acquired by private equity.
It’s not hard to understand why. “We are constantly understaffed, underpaid, have to work crazy hours, and deal with multiple patients. Half of our equipment is old and does not work half the time,” said a healthcare worker at an Iowa private equity hospital. By cutting full-time employees by 11.6% and salaries by 16.6%, hospital staff are left stretched dangerously thin, unable to properly care for their patients.
This is the harsh reality of the so-called “invisible hand of the free market.” All capitalist healthcare is a nightmare; the hospitals raided by private equity represent only the most extreme example. The finance capitalists treat hospitals as just another asset to gamble on, often destroying them in the process. Despite only operating 8.5% of private hospitals, private equity accounted for 44% of healthcare bankruptcies in 2025.
Private equity firm Cerberus Capital pocketed $1.3 billion from Stewart Health Care, operator of the facilities where Rashid and Melendez-Brancaccio died. As the company teetered on bankruptcy in 2024, Stewart CEO Roberto de la Torre was cruising in his $40 million yacht around the Galapagos islands. These are the parasites who sacrifice the lives of thousands every year at the altar of Mammon.
It doesn’t have to be this way. A workers’ government could rationally plan our healthcare system, ensuring crucial resources are distributed based on need, not profit. It would nationalize the pharmaceutical and medical industries, hospital networks, and related clinics, integrating them into a democratically administered public health provider. Hospitals would be fully staffed and healthcare would be free at the point of service.
Under socialism, we’ll put the private equity leeches where they belong: the dustbin of history.