Community Catalyst Joins With More Than 90 Groups In Sending Comments to DOJ, FTC, and HHS Urging for Meaningful Action To Curb Harmful Practices

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Today, Community Catalyst, alongside more than 90 multi-issue local, state and national organizations, collectively sounded the alarm to the Biden administration about the largely unregulated and growing influence of private equity (PE) in the health care system, which leads to higher medical bills and poorer health outcomes. Together, we are urging for swift action and have outlined concrete steps the Department of Justice, the Federal Trade Commission, and the Department of Health and Human Services can take to protect communities, as part of a Request For Information made by the agencies on the impact of corporate greed in health care. The comment period ended today. 

  • You can see Community Catalyst’s comments here.
  • You can see comments from more than 90 multi-issue organizations here. 

“The financial structures within the U.S. health system often hinder people from achieving and maintaining their best health,” shared Michelle Sternthal, Director of Government Affairs, Community Catalyst. “It’s unfair that individuals are frequently forced into a tough dilemma between seeking medical care and facing overwhelming debt. This situation is perpetuated by dominant players in the industry and their unchecked consolidation of power, prioritizing profits over community health. This detrimental trend affects us all.”

The more than 90 organizations — convened by Americans for Financial Reform, Community Catalyst and the Private Equity Stakeholder Project — said in their collective comments:

The PE industry has grown dramatically in recent years. From less than $1 trillion in assets under management in 2004, PE and other private funds firms now manage more than $13.1 trillion and are growing quickly. PE’s reach across health care, in terms of both size and scope, has increased dramatically over the same period. There were more than 1,400 PE deals in health care in 2021, totaling $209 billion. These investments touch virtually every aspect of health care, including nursing facilities, hospitals, physician specialties such as gastroenterology and anesthesiology, emergency medicine, dentistry, travel nursing, durable medical equipment, behavioral health, disability services, and health care services for people in prisons and jails.

They undermine the clinical relationship between professionals and their patients by stripping the professionals’ autonomy and replacing it with a corporate structure concerned with profits rather than health. The typical results of PE inroads into a market – higher prices, closures of unprofitable services and facilities, reduced quality of care and outcomes – intersect with existing structural racism in the health care system to further harm people of color. The exacerbated racial and economic disparities resulting from private equity’s inroads into health care create additional obstacles for federal and state governments to address health disparities in their communities. The racial justice implications of PE’s large footprint in health care make PE’s business model, which is fundamentally incompatible with good health care and a healthy, competitive market, worthy of special attention from regulators and policymakers. PE further exacerbates the structural racism present in our healthcare system.

In addition to submitting the comments, Community Catalyst has launched a petition and storytelling effort urging the Biden administration to take swift action by centering the experiences of impacted communities. 

“At Community Catalyst, we collaborate with partners to shed light on the corporate interests driving decisions in health care. We aim to demonstrate how prioritizing profit over people’s well-being harms both our communities and our nation,” continued Sternthal “It’s imperative for policymakers to heed the voices of their constituents, prioritize people’s health over profits, and take meaningful action.”

Making sure that we have a health care system that prioritizes people over profits is a major pillar of Community Catalyst’s efforts to expose the corporate interests that drive decisions in our health system, and all the ways prioritizing profit over people’s health hurts our communities and country. Learn more here.

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About Community Catalyst:

Community Catalyst is a national organization dedicated to building the power of people to create a health system rooted in race equity and health justice, and a society where health is a right for all. We’re an experienced, trusted partner to organizations across the country, a change agent to policymakers at the local, state, and national level, and both an adversary and a collaborator to health systems in our efforts to advance health justice. We partner with local, state and national organizations and leaders to leverage and build power so that people are at the center of important decisions about health and health care, whether they are made by health care executives, in state houses, or on Capitol Hill. Together with partners, we’re building a powerful, united movement with a shared vision of and strategy for a health system accountable to all people. Learn more at communitycatalyst.org.