Front-line health care workers had a grueling job in the pandemic, and shortages of protective personal equipment and medical supplies didn’t help. Some of those issues made widespread headlines, but the cause of these issues, which led to a widespread loss of human life, has been less well-explored. 

In their new book, These Are the Plunderers: How Private Equity Runs–and Wrecks–America, authors Gretchen Morgenson and Joshua Rosner provide insight on the root cause of these issues, exposing the ways in which private equity groups made billions in health care, while shortchanging Americans when they needed help the most.

“We felt after Covid landed, and it was so devastating across the country, that it was really exposing what had gone on for the past 30 years [in private equity],” said Morgenson, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who is now the senior financial reporter for the NBC News Investigative Unit.

“We were watching as the government was trying to set up programs to protect the public [and] here these firms were, right at the government trough, with lobbyists leading the charge, trying to explain that they were systemically important and needed access to the [Federal Reserve Bank], and for the Fed to start protecting and buying their assets,” said Rosner, a New York Times bestselling author and managing partner at the independent research consultancy Graham Fisher & Co.

The pair spoke at From Day One’s Brooklyn conference in a session titled “A Dim View of Private Equity: How an Insidious Financial Industry Harms Everyday Americans, Tanks the Companies It Acquires, and Puts Our Entire Economic System at Risk.” 

Observing these bleak scenes of hardship for working class people, Rosner said he and Morgenson thought it was a “Charles Dickens moment.” They quickly recognized, Rosner said, that “nobody was talking about the fact that those shortages were driven” by the private equity industry. 

“Private equity had been buying up health care businesses for years, and really eviscerating them,” said Morgenson. They went the route of “sucking the profits and the earnings of the assets right out.”

Discussion moderator Robert Boynton, director of the literary reportage program at New York University’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute, said that to achieve this, the private equity firms made severe cuts to “ventilators, extra rooms and emergency rooms and other things like that, which in normal times perhaps you don’t need, but hospitals are supposed to be prepared for abnormal times.” However, in the minds of the new school of hospital overseers, Boynton said, “the bottom line doesn’t allow that.”

Boynton asked Morgenson and Rosner why the health care industry became such a target for private equity firms.

“Well, it’s 17% of the gross domestic product in this country,” said Morgenson. “It’s a very, very rich vein to mine for these people and you also have government programs that are standing there waiting to be milked or manipulated.”

She added that it’s dangerous when profits come into play while individual care for human beings is on the line. “This should be a utility,” said Morgenson. “These hospitals should be things that serve the public, not some financial interests.”

Much in the way that the pandemic helped rejigger our cultural outlook toward the workplace–with a growing number of employees prioritizing well-being as much as paychecks–it seems as though the crisis has also prompted an examination of the private equity industry, with people starting to question the sustainability of the business model, Morgenson said. It perhaps couldn’t have come at a better time. 

“These are extremely wealthy, extremely powerful people; Washington is very happy to see their money and very happy to either act on their behalves of do nothing on their behalves, depending on how that benefits them,” Morgenson said. “I’m very disturbed that that is continuing to be the way they do business.”

But can change truly come about? Rosner said it might depend on the level of frustration readers of his book might have after consuming it. The general public still has a say in how the world operates; just look at the corporate response to the wave of worker empowerment the past two years.

“Get angry out there,” said Morgenson.

“Yeah, get your pitchforks out,” added Boynton.

Michael Stahl is a New York City-based freelance journalist, writer, and editor. You can read more of his work at MichaelStahlWrites.com, follow him on Twitter @MichaelRStahl, and order his first book, the autobiography of Major League Baseball pitcher Bartolo Colón, at Abrams Books.