Ira Byock
speaker
629 appearances
3 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2019
last heard Jul 2025
Ira Byock’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
They were mostly wholly owned by people passionate about the field and passionate about the mission of caring for people who were approaching the end of life.
They were highly efficient.
Um their staffing ratios, the physician involvement, their responses to emergencies, all the things that I care passionately about were were actually quite good.
What happened, and I was directed.
Directly a part of not in an ownership or employed way, but but um but in a consultant and and you know supporter way of a number of the early for-profits, what happened was that they went through initial public offerings.
They went through IPOs and they and they began being traded on Wall Street and they became investor-owned.
And as soon as they became investor-owned,
Um
There were two missions.
One was to deliver excellent care to dying people and their families, and the other was to return a reasonable return on investment to their shore shareholders.
They are legitimate, that's an illegitimate mission of an investor-owned program.
But it balances and is intentioned sometimes with giving the best care possible.
And what we've seen now is
that now private equity has gotten in and now the founders of the the uh wholly owned you know people who own those programs drift away they get bought out or they retire or something and things change it's not it's not that for the investor owned or private equity owned programs are immoral
They're more amoral.
They ha they have to balance these two missions.
And and again, I want them all to succeed, but they must succeed by delivering consistently, reliably, excellent chaos.
And I I'm not about to be paralyzed by allegations of complexity.
Our field has a role to play in that.
I I don't know.
Showing 241–260 of 629 · page 13 of 32
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