It’s difficult to heap enough scorn on the opening ceremony of the Obama Presidential Center event on Juneteenth. The very fact it was held on the day commemorating the end of slavery in the US despite Obama destroying black wealth, the takeover of a public park, the ugliness of the building, the oligarchs paying it for it, the tone deafness delight in holding a celebrity-packed self-congratulatory bash even as the world burns, and the family-blog W-Michelle Altoids sequel.
And the never ending arguments that if we could just get rid of the current monster in the White House and go back to this, all would be right with the world:
Someday, let’s get back to this, America. pic.twitter.com/25GZ6DHUB3
— Protect Kamala Harris ✊ (@DisavowTrump20) June 18, 2026
To once again refute this type of argument, let’s start with another event that occurred in the runup to Juneteenth roughly 15 miles across Chicago. It’s one that tells the story of Obama and the Democrats much better than all the revolting royal pageantry at the crusader fortress in Jackson Park.
On June 11, the Chicago suburb of Oak Park closed down West Suburban Medical Center after the hospital’s last functioning elevator went kaput. Firefighters had to be called in to help patients stranded on upper floors. More from the Chicago Tribune:
Though the owner of the company that operates West Suburban abruptly closed the hospital in March, some providers that were not part of the hospital’s operations had still been using the building.
A dialysis clinic that saw about 140 patients a week on the fifth floor of the hospital’s professional building had continued to operate, and PCC Community Wellness Center had continued to run three clinics there.
They left Thursday after Oak Park closed the building to the public. The only people allowed in the building now are security and maintenance workers, Jacobsen said.
“We’ve basically been scrambling to move 140 patients,” said Dr. George Naratadam, a nephrologist at West Suburban. “They can’t really miss dialysis or they could die.”
Dialysis patients now have to go to different dialysis sites in the area, but those locations may be farther from their homes and they may not be able to get in at their usual times, Naratadam said. Patients must typically undergo dialysis three times a week for four hours at a time.
The sad end to West Suburban comes after private equity squeezed the facility dry and then discarded it. Like other Chicago-area hospitals Weiss Memorial (closed last year) and Westlake (closed 2019), West Suburban was also at one point owned by Pipeline Health, a private equity-backed hospital chain. Pipeline still holds a $67 million subordinate note tied to the broader hospital operations of Resilience Healthcare, which along with landlord Ramco Healthcare Holdings, purchased West Suburban in 2022.
Ramco, Resilience, Pipeline, and another private equity outfit in Miami, Rialto Capital Advisors, are now engaged in a messy court battle over tens of millions of dollars while patients suffer.
Not to worry, though, The Real Deal assures us the West Suburban legal fight is not representative of the wider Chicago-area healthcare attractiveness as an investment:
The severe distress stands in contrast to the broader Chicago health care real estate sector, where medical office properties remain in high demand. Driven by an aging population and low inventory, investors are treating clinical space as a refuge from the traditional office slump, pushing local medical deal volume past $600 million this year.
And that ensures more West Suburbans in the not-too-distant future. Fear not, though, poor patients, for a beacon of hope now rises:
🚨WATCH: Former First Lady @MichelleObama says the Obama Presidential Center is a “beacon of hope” built on values like equality, empathy, and fairness. pic.twitter.com/yNAxcwa8IK
— Off The Press (@OffThePress1) June 18, 2026
A beacon of hope.
So what’s the connection between Obama, the concrete monolith, and the dialysis patients being evacuated from a private-equity-gutted healthcare facility?
The failures of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) are well documented, but it’s worth remembering once again how just like Obama’s response to the foreclosure crisis helped private equity scoop up homes at a bargain and turn around to rent them to us, the ACA helped pave the way for private equity’s increased role in healthcare.
While private equity had long been active in the health care sector, it took off after 2010. Staying in the Windy City, here’s the The University of Chicago Business Law Review:
Mergers and acquisitions of healthcare entities have been a popular method of achieving greater efficiency to increase revenue, lower costs, and improve patient care.10This is reflected in the dramatic increase of hospital consolidations over the past three decades.11In 1990, 65% of Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSAs) had highly concentrated hospital markets (those with HHIs greater than 2,500), and in 2006 that percentage increased to 77%.12These transactions operate under the assumption that large scale is needed for lower costs.
The federal government’s Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) further incentivized this goal of improved patient care at a lower cost through the Affordable Care Act (ACA), enacted in 2010.13The ACA aimed to reward hospitals for improving patient outcomes and reducing costs.14This motivated hospital mergers because hospitals needed to share the expenses of the deliverables, among them dramatically improved quality of care, required by the ACA that accompanied.15It also incentivized hospital acquisitions of physicians’ practices to increase overall revenue by shifting patient care to an outpatient setting thus increasing the hospitals’ “outpatient revenues and secur[ing] referrals for hospital-based services.”16Consolidation kept the revenue from patients’ different hospital visits within the single hospital system. Between 2015 and 2016, over 5,000 physician practices were acquired by hospitals, illustrating the desirability of this tactic.17PE firms’ investment in health care became one of the many ways the industry has corporatized in the last few decades.18Healthcare is a desirable industry for PE investment, given its potential for high revenue, which leads to significant returns on investment for the firms.
Naturally, private financial structures, debt-leveraging, and asset-stripping weren’t targeted in the ACA.
The shift to more care coordination and management efforts also entailed more “information-sharing” which can be abused for price-fixing. The ACA expanded a Clinton-era loophole in the Sherman antitrust Act. In 1993, first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton and other officials announced steps to make healthcare more “available” and “affordable” to all Americans.
The policy statements provided for antitrust “safety zones” which created circumstances under which the DOJ and the FTC would not challenge the following:
Hospital mergers;
Hospital joint ventures involving high-technology or other expensive medical equipment;
Physicians’ provision of information to purchasers of health care services;
Hospital participation in exchanges of price and cost information;
Joint purchasing arrangements among health care providers;
Physician network joint ventures.
The rules were further liberated in 1996 and then again in 2011 under Obama’s Affordable Care Act and its Accountable Care Organizations provision. According to the DOJ, this was the stated reason for the Clintons unveiling the “safety zones”:
The policy statements will help alleviate uncertainty within the health care industry making it easier for mergers and joint ventures to take place, resulting in lower health care costs.
How’d that work out?
Even worse, however, is the economic termite infestation,described here by Matt Stoller in a piece on the merger of private-equity-owned Qualtrics and Press Ganey Forsta, the two big companies offering the so-called the Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems survey (HCAHPS):
So why does this HCAHPS survey exist? It’s not actually to improve health care, it’s to try to help with the private rationing that is so pervasive in American medicine under the name “value-based care.” As I noted back in December of last year, the point of Obamacare, and previous reforms such as Bush’s changes to Medicare, was to put a check on the ability of doctors to get patients medicine and treatments, under the assumption of hundreds of billions of dollars of over-treatments due to the desire of doctors to hand out medicine like candy.
At the time, there were studies suggesting over-treatment as the root cause of excess cost in American health care, so the idea was to put a stop to it by interfering with the judgment of the doctor and patient. Such rationing couldn’t be done directly by a government health care system because that would be COMMUNISM, so health policy wonks came up with this alternative model. As an important government official named Doug Elmendorf testified to Congress in 2009 when advocating for the ACA, the idea was to avoid “explicit rationing” of treatments but instead to allow rationing to “occur as a result of market mechanisms.” So, private communism, which apparently is totally cool.
Hospitals, clinicians, et al, would no longer be paid based on the treatments they dispensed, but they would get a lump sum of money to manage a patient. The less they spent on that patient, they more they could keep. Still, this “value-based care” model left a problem – how do you measure whether someone is actually getting the treatment they need? One answer was to have quality metrics imposed by the government, and give bonus payments based on those metrics. The HCAHPS survey is one of those metrics for hospitals. (There are many such metrics, nonsense attempts to justify value-based care is an entire industry.)
Now, the old model where a clinician would just bill for a service or treatment wasn’t perfect, but it relied on the judgement and training of professionals. The value-based care model is simply about playing around with financial metrics. And of course, you couldn’t just have the government directly do the survey because COMMUNISM, so the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services approves a list of vendors. As these vendors bake their products into hospital workflows and billing departments, it becomes hard to switch survey providers. It sounds like a classic economic termite, a tiny and nearly unnoticeable cost increase hidden in the crevice of our economy. And now with more limited antitrust enforcement around mergers, we have Qualtrics and Press Ganey trying to combine. Hooray!
Hooray, indeed. It’s easy to see how Obama was able to raise nearly a billion dollars for the monstrosity on Michigan. Look who’s making calls: Marty Nesbitt, Obama’s former national campaign treasurer, serves as the board chair of the Obama Foundation. He is the co-founder and co-CEO of the Chicago-based private equity firm, The Vistria Group. Demond Martin, partner at Adage Capital Management, helps lead fundraising for the Obama Foundation.
While lawmakers in some states are finally acknowledging the disaster of private equity in healthcare (79 bills in 25 states have been introduced to address the issues), we’ll see what comes of it.
It’s now been 17 years since the passage of the ACA, a decade since Obama left office, and Democrats continue to pretend it was not a devastating reign for the majority of Americans.
And as much as they might want to pretend the Obama Center is a beacon of hope, it looks more like a shrine to the more refined war criminals —in the wars abroad and the class war at home. But hey, at least they share Altoids.
