Â鶹ŮÓÅ

Dear Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Private equity (PE) is the fastest-growing malignancy of the American healthcare system. In your new position as secretary of HHS, I implore you to protect the health of Americans and put an end to the dangerous practice of leveraged buyouts (LBOs) of healthcare facilities by PE firms. (Richard K. Leuchter, 2/19)

Have the critics forgotten that health care was a mess decades before private equity got involved? PE wasn’t responsible for the explosion in health care prices after Medicare began operations. That was government (with lots of help from self-interested doctors and hospitals). The fact that one-third of Medicare spending is pure waste is not the fault of PE investors either. It’s the result of government loosening or eliminating the market constraints that prevent providers from using asymmetric information to take advantage of patients. (Charles M. Silver, David A. Hyman and Michael F. Cannon, 2/20)

Farmers in Georgia’s northeastern corner woke up on Jan. 15 to discover that birds in their flock of 45,000 chickens were ill and dying. Within 24 hours, the state’s veterinary laboratory confirmed the problem was bird flu. Within two days, the Georgia Department of Agriculture sent an emergency team to kill all infected and exposed birds, disinfect the barns, set up a 10-kilometer quarantine zone around the farm and impose mandatory testing on every poultry operation inside it. (Maryn McKenna, 2/20)

The purge of thousands of employees across multiple agencies within the US Department of Health and Human Services will compromise Americans' health and safety. The indiscriminate cuts mean new parents might wonder about the safety of their infant's formula, the public must wait longer for better treatments for cancer and Alzheimer’s Disease, and we might not know if bird flu takes a more serious turn. (Lisa Jarvis, 2/19)

What’s now called diversity, equity and inclusion evolved from the Civil Rights Movement and federal anti-discrimination laws enacted in the 1960s. If DEI efforts don’t exist, we lose a safeguard against the blatant racism and discrimination that were common in the country not that long ago, and some of that is still around. If we don’t keep our guard up, those old days could come back. (Harry Mok, 2/18)