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Begin New Search Topic Privatization Political Geography United States

1. Private Equity Buyouts in Healthcare: Who Wins, Who Loses?

Author:
Eileen Appelbaum and Rosemary Batt
Publication Date:
03-2020
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET)
Abstract:
Private equity firms have become major players in the healthcare industry. How has this happened and what are the results? What is private equity’s ‘value proposition’ to the industry and to the American people -- at a time when healthcare is under constant pressure to cut costs and prices? How can PE firms use their classic leveraged buyout model to ‘save healthcare’ while delivering ‘outsized returns’ to investors? In this paper, we bring together a wide range of sources and empirical evidence to answer these questions. Given the complexity of the sector, we focus on four segments where private equity firms have been particularly active: hospitals, outpatient care (urgent care and ambulatory surgery centers), physician staffing and emergency room services (surprise medical billing), and revenue cycle management (medical debt collecting). In each of these segments, private equity has taken the lead in consolidating small providers, loading them with debt, and rolling them up into large powerhouses with substantial market power before exiting with handsome returns.
Topic:
Economics, Privatization, Health Care Policy, Health Insurance, and Private Equity
Political Geography:
United States

2. RESET OF AMERICA’S NUCLEAR WASTE MANAGEMENT

Author:
Center for International Security and Cooperation
Publication Date:
10-2018
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC), Stanford University
Abstract:
The U.S. government has worked for decades and spent tens of billions of dollars in search of a permanent resting place for the Nation’s nuclear waste. Some 80,000 tons of highly radioactive spent fuel from commercial nuclear power plants and millions of gallons of high-level nuclear waste from defense programs are stored in pools, dry casks and large tanks throughout the country at more than 75 sites in 39 states. A Stanford-led study recommends that the United States “reset” its nuclear waste program by moving responsibility for commercially generated, used nuclear fuel away from the federal government and into the hands of an independent, not-for-profit, utility-owned and funded nuclear waste management organization. The three year study led by Rod Ewing in the Center for International Security and Cooperation has made a series of recommendations focused on the back-end of the nuclear fuel cycle.
Topic:
Nuclear Weapons, Privatization, NGOs, and Nuclear Waste
Political Geography:
United States, North America, Washington, and D.C.

3. U.S. Prison Labor: Constitutional & Profitable

Author:
Kate Morgan
Publication Date:
04-2017
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Center on Human Rights Education, University of Denver
Abstract:
In the United States modern prison industrial complex (PIC), there are about 2 million inmates, marking the U.S. as the largest prison population in the world and the second highest incarceration rate per capita. The U.S. has 25% of the world’s prison population, but only 5% of the world’s population. With historical roots involved in using inmates as labor for agriculture, textiles, and other manufactured goods, this practice still continues by means of privatizing labor. Under the 13th amendment, forced labor is legally allowed when a person is imprisoned. Prisoners will never have “family emergencies”, ask for a pay raise, or refuse work without the threat of solitary confinement. This makes them the ideal economically conservative employee. Private companies and organizations will lease work out to prisons, and the prisons will then use their inmates to perform the needed work, whether it be mining, agricultural work, making military weapons, or making garments and clothing for Victoria’s Secret. The pay grade for an inmate doing this work can range from nothing to $3 per hour varying per state, with Texas and Georgia legally not having to pay anything to their inmates/employees.
Topic:
Human Rights, Privatization, Labor Issues, Prisons/Penal Systems, and Manufacturing
Political Geography:
United States and North America

4. Leveraging Global Value Chains for a Federated Approach to Defense

Author:
David J. Berteau, Scott Miller, Ryan Crotty, and Paul Nadeau
Publication Date:
12-2014
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Center for Strategic and International Studies
Abstract:
CSIS launched the Federated Defense Project to assess and recommend concrete ways for the United States and its partners to integrate their defense capabilities in support of shared interests. Rather than creating interdependencies that would hinder autonomous action or bind partners to commitments to which they only share a tangential interest, the federated defense strategy builds on the natural interests of allies and partners to develop closer working ties to the United States and one another in order to manage the challenges posed by constrained resources and a daunting geostrategic environment. Buttressing any form of federated defense must be a set of bottom-up, organic interactions within the private sector to develop the capabilities that will underpin these security architectures. The expansion of business-to-business relationships among providers of platforms, supplies, and services to the network of trusted partners and allies is a key building block in ensuring adequate capabilities development, integration, and interoperability. To date, this interaction has occurred despite the many barriers that exist to their success. A federated approach will seek to enable this cooperation and lower these barriers, leading to greater cooperation, collaboration, and integration through global value chains (GVCs). Addressing the findings below is essential to the successful execution of a federated approach to defense.
Topic:
Defense Policy, Privatization, and Military Strategy
Political Geography:
United States

5. Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and the Future of Federal Housing Finance Policy: A Study of Regulatory Privilege

Author:
David Reiss
Publication Date:
04-2011
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
The Cato Institute
Abstract:
The federal government recently placed Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government-chartered, privately owned mortgage finance companies, in conservatorship. These two massive companies are profit driven, but as government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs) they also have a government-mandated mission to provide liquidity and stability to the U.S. mortgage market and to achieve certain affordable housing goals. How the two companies should exit their conservatorship has implications that reach throughout the global financial markets and are of key importance to the future of American housing finance policy.
Topic:
Economics, Markets, Privatization, Financial Crisis, and Governance
Political Geography:
United States

6. The Big U-Turn: Japan Threatens to Reverse Postal Reforms

Author:
Gary Clyde Hufbauer and Julia Muir
Publication Date:
06-2010
Content Type:
Policy Brief
Institution:
Peterson Institute for International Economics
Abstract:
On May 31, 2010 a majority of the Lower House of the National Diet of Japan approved legislation that would reverse a decade's worth of effort to fully privatize key subsidiaries of Japan Post Holdings Co. Ltd. Besides postal services, the state-run postal system offers banking and insurance services, through Japan Post Bank (JPB) and Japan Post Insurance (JPI), respectively. These are the financial engines of Japan Post and were the units slated for privatization. Both subsidiaries have long received favorable government treatment, tilting the playing field against private banks and insurance firms, whether foreign or domestic. The government of Japan is in clear violation of its commitments under the World Trade Organization (WTO), and if the Upper House approves the legislation, Japan will reverse the efforts made by the United States and the European Union, as well as domestic private banks and insurance firms, to establish a level playing field. What's more, Japan risks having a formal WTO dispute brought against it.
Topic:
Economics, Government, and Privatization
Political Geography:
United States, Japan, and Europe

7. The Massachusetts Health Plan: Much Pain, Little Gain

Author:
Michael F. Cannon and Aaron Yelowitz
Publication Date:
01-2010
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
The Cato Institute
Abstract:
In 2006, Massachusetts enacted a sweeping health insurance law that mirrors the legislation currently before Congress. After signing the measure, Gov. Mitt Romney (R) wrote, "Every uninsured citizen in Massachusetts will soon have affordable health insurance and the costs of health care will be reduced." But did the legislation achieve these goals? And what other effects has it had? This paper is the first to use Current Population Survey data for 2008 to evaluate the Massachusetts law, and the first to examine its effects on the accuracy of the CPS's uninsured estimates, self-reported health, the extent of "crowd-out" of private insurance for both children and adults, and in-migration of new Massachusetts residents.
Topic:
Government, Health, and Privatization
Political Geography:
United States

8. Obama's Prescription for Low-Wage Workers: High Implicit Taxes, Higher Premiums

Author:
Michael F. Cannon
Publication Date:
01-2010
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
The Cato Institute
Abstract:
House and Senate Democrats have produced health care legislation whose mandates, subsidies, tax penalties, and health insurance regulations would penalize work and reward Americans who refuse to purchase health insurance. As a result, the legislation could trap many Americans in low-wage jobs and cause even higher health-insurance premiums, government spending, and taxes than are envisioned in the legislation.
Topic:
Government, Health, and Privatization
Political Geography:
United States and America

9. Private Contractors in Conflict Zones: The Good, the Bad, and the Strategic Impact

Author:
T.X. Hammes
Publication Date:
10-2010
Content Type:
Working Paper
Abstract:
In Iraq and Afghanistan, the use of contractors reached a level unprecedented in U.S. military operations. As of March 31, 2010, the United States deployed 175,000 troops and 207,000 contractors in the war zones. Contractors represented 50 percent of the Department of Defense (DOD) workforce in Iraq and 59 percent in Afghanistan. These numbers include both armed and unarmed contractors. Thus, for the purposes of this paper, the term contractor includes both armed and unarmed personnel unless otherwise specified. The presence of contractors on the battlefield is obviously not a new phenomenon but has dramatically increased from the ratio of 1 contractor to 55 military personnel in Vietnam to 1:1 in the Iraq and 1.43:1 in Afghanistan.
Topic:
Security, Defense Policy, Privatization, War, and Counterinsurgency
Political Geography:
Afghanistan, United States, and Iraq

10. Did Reagan Rule In Vain? A Closer Look at True Expenditure Levels in the United States and Europe

Author:
Jacob Funk Kirkegaard
Publication Date:
01-2009
Content Type:
Policy Brief
Institution:
Peterson Institute for International Economics
Abstract:
It is generally believed that the United States is a country of low taxes and small government, at least when compared with countries in Europe (and until the financial crisis so greatly expanded the role of the federal government in the United States in late 2008). Fully accounting for the role, size, and effect of the government in an economy is a complex endeavor, however, and it is hardly accomplished by repeatedly restating differences in top marginal tax rates, overall tax burdens, or gross sizes of governments in GDP terms.
Topic:
Economics, Government, Political Economy, and Privatization
Political Geography:
United States and Europe