Health Experts Discuss the Growing Role of Private Equity in Hospice Care

One of the nation’s leading health law experts joined a conversation about the increasing financialization of hospice care at a recent Yale Law School event.

Barry R. Furrow, a professor of law at Drexel University and director of the Health Law Program there, was the featured speaker for the Sept. 25 talk, “Private Equity Comes to Hospice.” The Solomon Center for Health Law and Policy at Yale Law School, the Yale Law School Center for the Study of Corporate Law, the Yale Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics, and the Yale Health Law and Policy Society (YHeLPS) hosted the event. Dr. Stephen R. Latham, director of the Yale Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics, moderated.

Hospice is a form of end-of-life care that provides comfort, support, and medical assistance to individuals with serious illnesses and their families. When the Medicare hospice benefit was introduced in 1983, lawmakers anticipated that most care providers would be non-profit entities. Now, over three quarters of them operate for profit. The hospice provider market has also become a growing focus of private equity (PE) firms — financial firms that raise capital from private investors to buy companies and re-sell them for a return.

Furrow discussed how private equity firms’ investment strategies can incentivize the pursuit of short-term financial gains over long-term stability in hospice operations, leading to worse health outcomes for vulnerable patients. He explained that increased scrutiny of hospice acquisitions, mergers, and payment structures, among other policy changes, could help reduce incentives for firms to pursue short-term profit at the expense of hospice care quality.

The event concluded with audience questions from students from Yale Law School, the Yale School of Medicine, the Yale School of Management, and the Yale School of Public Health.

About the Solomon Center

The Solomon Center for Health Law and Policy at Yale Law School is the first of its kind to focus on the intersection of law and the governance, practice, and business of health care. The Center brings together leading experts and practitioners from the public and private sectors to address cutting-edge questions of health law and policy, and to train the next generation of top health lawyers, industry leaders, policymakers, and academics.