From the article...

Private equity firms have been acquiring large chunks of the US health care delivery system in recent years. In addition to hospitals, those acquisitions include nursing homes, behavioral health systems, and private physician practices. Academic research has shown that private equity ownership is associated with higher death rates for patients in nursing homes and increased costs to taxpayers.

When you go into a hospital for a procedure (and probably an admission), you sign a document saying you will pay for services not covered by your insurance. It will say that some of the providers are not employees of the facility, thus must be covered separately by the insurance company. However, how can you know if the provider is covered when you don't know who they are or who they work for? Besides being right before you receive the procedure.

Compass and KnoxViews both do a pretty good job of covering local medical infrastructure as far as community media services go, but without full time staff, the workload is too overwhelming to be covered thoroughly by citizen journalists. Not bitching, but just noting what's happened since the start of covid, I've had authorship priviledges suspended, been banned outright and have had pieces censored simply for opening a dictionary and figuring out just what was going on. I was kicked off of NextDoor when indoor air quality was found to be a factor in covid spread in our schools. I had a posted censored on Reddit, for redundancy, for pointing out just what exactly was entailed in caring for patients in our emergency rooms on Christmas (Compass left it up). There is no question the County is suppressing data, they haven't published pediatric death statistics since right around the second pediatric death. Pediatric deaths as a result of our schools failure to mitigate the spread of disease will become more and more of a community problem across America. We don't even acknowledge it as a problem.

I went to the mediation hearing over School Masking I sat over with the School System employees mostly shooting the shit about topics from Mildred Doyle to tank tactics since Russ Oaks and I were in ROTC together. I mentioned that I'd just seen research indicating that the airborne viral load within schools had been shown to be linked to faulty ventilation systems and that Washington DC had recently upgraded their HVAC systems to state of the art and had seen improvements, large improvements, over virtually every measurable aspect at every school upgraded, test scores, attendance, both student and faculty was up, significantly. I mentioned to Russ that their program cost 60 million dollars and that it would likely be three times that here, since we had three times as many schools. Schools across the nation were getting this upgrade through ESSER funding. We didn't even apply for it. At any rate, Russ raised his eyebrows and said that it would cost more to do that here, due to the present state of our present systems and what it would take for that kind of upgrade. When I threw out the quarter billion remark he said that was probably ballpark. When Kristi Kristy was interviewed on the Knox Compass Sunday podcast, she acknowledged that many of our systems were so old that they couldn't even find parts for them to keep them operational anymore.

What has happened locally is that those that were warning of the direst of dangers of a failure of covid response is that those folks have been right. Go watch some of the old Board of Health meetings. Look at what other people are doing. Monday, a patient with symptoms of a heart attack had to wait in an emergency room full of unmasked patients waiting to be seen for transmissible respiatory illnesses. Who trains infected peoplke to act in this manner? We're in the midst of a transmissible repiratory disease outbreak and folks that are actively spreading these diseases to the whole hospital aren't even being required to mask in hospitals? Our Health Department is criminally negligent. Glenn Jacobs is currently the head of the Health Department. These are his decisions.

I'm going to end this by posting a link to the Dane County/Madison infectious disease dashboard, where you can find covid data. I'd ask you to note that airborne viral load metrics have their own page. Our only page of covid numbers has four numbers. There a reason we have a thousand excess deaths over their death count. It was the government response to covid that mattered most, from the beginning on.

(link...). (I tried to que this to page five where airborne data is shown. If I didn't get it there, that';s where it is.) This is an example of what a community that is taking covid seriously is doing now.

Ex-Senator Bill Frist's family started HCA.

Senator Rick Scott, FL, co-founded Columbia Hospital Corporation that merged with HCA.

In 1993, lawsuits were filed against HCA by former employees who alleged that the company had engaged in questionable Medicare billing practices.[8] In 1997, with a federal investigation by the FBI, the IRS and the Department of Health and Human Services in its early stages, the Columbia/HCA board of directors forced Rick Scott to resign as chairman and CEO amid growing evidence that the company "had kept two sets of books, one to show the government and one with actual expenses listed."[8] Thomas Frist, a co-founder of HCA and brother of U.S. Senator Bill Frist, returned to the company as CEO in 1997...

In July 2005, U.S. Senator Bill Frist sold all of his HCA shares, which were held in a blind trust, two weeks before disappointing earnings sent the stock on a 9-point plunge. At the time, Frist was considering a run for president and said that he had sold his shares to avoid the appearance of a conflict of interest.[54] When the company disclosed that other executives had also sold their shares during that same time, shareholders alleged that the company had made false claims about its profits to drive up the price, which then fell when the company reported disappointing financial results. Eleven of HCA's senior officers were sued for accounting fraud and insider trading.[55] HCA settled the lawsuit in August 2007, agreeing to pay $20 million to the shareholders but admitting no wrongdoing, and no charges were brought.

Not clear to me but would ...

A strong and unambiguous ban on the corporate practice of medicine exists in Tennessee, supported by a mix of statutes, court decisions, and Attorney General opinions. The Tennessee Practice of Medicine Act and the Tennessee Prohibition Against the Corporate Practice of Medicine Act are two important acts that codify this strict prohibition.

prevent private equity entities from managing emergency rooms?

So sad and scary.

I had a staff infection a year or two before covid. I almost lost my arm. I was boarded in a hallway at St. Mary's for about 36 hours, as I re4call. In the hospital ten days. It's my understanding that it's significantly worse now. Maybe the whole point of the way Jacobs runs the Health Department is to make sure people like me DON"T make it. Seems to be the direction our Health Department is heade since Buchanan's departure.