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Over the past decade, private equity has creeped and crawled into all corners of our lives. Everywhere you look across our ruinous, virus-riddled landscape, private equity is there. It is behind many of the understaffed and underprepared nursing homes through which COVID-19 tore, the surprise medical bills that will greet those lucky enough to make it home, and the evictions sending people out onto the streets amidst a global pandemic. It is also getting ready to pounce on many of the high-profile companies to have fallen since the pandemic’s onset.

Private equity firms play an increasingly central role in financing the healthcare industry. These firm’s investments in healthcare include everything from hospitals to ambulance transport companies to specialized medical services. The industry’s encroachment into healthcare is increasing costs, especially in circumstances where patients have few choices and are in need of immediate medical attention.

Private equity (PE) owned nursing homes have a bad reputation. The industry’s, by now infamous, cost-cutting strategies have been shown to lead to measurable declines in patients’ health, safety, and wellbeing when undertaken in the nursing home context. The Carlyle Group’s acquisition of HCR ManorCare in 2011, for example, left patients with “overdoses, bedsores, [and] broken bones” before driving the company into financial ruin.

Eleanor Eagan | Max Moran

Beginning in the fall, the Revolving Door Project was one of a handful of voices drawing attention to Democratic primary candidates’ failure to release the names of their most important fundraisers. In op-eds, newsletters, and across other forums throughout the fall we repeatedly made the case that this consequential information could not stay hidden.

Why were we so insistent? A candidate’s list of top fundraisers, or bundlers, provides clearer insight than perhaps any other piece of campaign material into how a candidate would actually do the job of being president.