I left these Comments yesterday because the Request For Information document itself says that May 6 was the deadline. The regulations portal showed the deadline as sometime in June. I am going with the original document as I could not find any information anywhere that the deadline was extended, but use your own judgment, of course.
COMMENTS IN RESPONSE TO REQUEST FOR INFORMATION, DOCKET NO. ATR 102 (ALSO: FTC DOCUMENT ID FTC-2024-0022-0001)
Question 1 asks about Effects of Consolidation.
Scheduling errors increased greatly after my long-standing family practitioners' practice was consolidated with a private equity firm. In my own experience, the people doing the scheduling changed after the consolidation, but they had been changing more frequently even before, as I recall. Even with the earlier changes in staff, there were never any scheduling errors that I can recall.
After the consolidation, I personally experienced being scheduled as a patient for the wrong times on the wrong days. It is one of the reasons I left that practice to become a patient elsewhere, after probably 25 years or more as their patient.
Apparent staff turnover. I have already mentioned that I personally observed staff turnover even before consolidation of my family practitioners' practice with a private equity firm. Putting that in perspective, the turnover before consolidation was not like the turnover after consolidation. Turnover was so frequent after consolidation that every appointment with their practice was an adventure in meeting staff that I had never met there before; the office just did not seem capable as a result of keeping people for any length of time, certainly not for the length of time that passed between one appointment to the next.
One notorious way that business owners increase their own take-home from their businesses is to reduce the expense of what they pay their workers. I ran my own business for 40 years and so I believe myself qualified to comment on that practice as short-sighted and stupid from the point-of-view of having an ongoing business, and to comment as well that although I have never chosen that way of running a business myself, it is a way that is guaranteed to increase your short-term profits.
You are not interested in general Comments on the way that businesses are run, of course. You have requested information on consolidation in health care markers. I have already mentioned the effects on me of staffing shortages and scheduling errors at my local family practitioners' office. Now I am going to tell you about the effects on me of professional shortages there.
To be continued ....
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