Plunder by Brendan Ballou

Author:Brendan Ballou [Ballou, Brendan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Published: 2023-06-27T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter ten

The Industry’s Strongest Advocates

Private Equity in Congress

Private equity is a force in Congress. Since 1990, the industry has given over $896 million to congressional candidates and members.1 This distribution of money has been bipartisan, with Republicans getting more—but just slightly more—than Democrats.2 But this money tells only part of the story of the industry’s influence. As noted earlier, private equity firms are populated with people who once held the most powerful positions in government. In addition to cabinet secretaries, generals, and two Speakers of the House (Paul Ryan and Newt Gingrich), any number of former congresspeople and senators now lobby on behalf of the industry3 and several serve as their advisers or board members.4 Perhaps even more importantly, the industry offers a home not just for former leaders in government but for their staff too. The lobbying disclosure forms for the largest firms are filled with the names of former government employees: former chiefs of staff and counsels, former legislative directors, and former special assistants.5 This means that when someone in government is lobbied by a private equity firm, the person doing the lobbying may be a friend or a former boss. It also means that those currently in government know that, quite likely, they have a home to go to when their time in public service comes to an end.

As a result, private equity has become one of Congress’s most important constituents. Through its money and connections, the industry has worked its unpopular will on Congress to enact surprise medical billing. It protected its preferred tax benefit, the carried interest loophole, despite its astounding unfairness and a fifteen-year campaign to end it. It extracted money from Congress during the pandemic. And it evaded oversight when firms, however inadvertently, damaged our national security. Quite simply, Congress works for few constituencies harder than it works for private equity.

All of the issues just mentioned are concerning, but it is the first—surprise medical billing—that tends to touch Americans most directly. For instance, Drew Calver was forty-four years old when he had his heart attack.6 Perhaps even more than most cardiac episodes, it was unexpected: Calver was a healthy high school teacher and swim coach and had competed in an Ironman Triathlon just a few months before. As he collapsed onto his bedroom floor, Calver called out to his young daughter and used the voice recognition feature on his phone to send a text message to his wife, who was at the grocery store at the time. Ultimately, a neighbor got to Calver and took him to a nearby hospital. Doctors implanted stents in his clogged artery the next day.

As reported by Kaiser Health News and NPR, Calver recovered, but at a terrible financial cost. The hospital charged him $164,941, of which he was personally responsible for over $100,000,7 despite the fact that Calver had insurance and that he even had the wherewithal to ask from his hospital bed whether it could cover the cost of his care (he was assured it would).

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.