Three facts about private equity in the US hospital sector

Private equity (PE) ownership of US hospitals has grown over the past 25 years, attracting substantial academic and policy attention. Despite this interest, fragmented and incomplete transaction data have made it difficult to establish basic facts critical to an informed debate about PE's effects on hospitals, patients, and payers.

Using a harmonized, publicly available PE acquisition data set, supplemented with verified exit transactions, we identify PE ownership spells for all short-term acute care hospitals from 2000 to 2024.

We identify 3 key facts: (1) PE ownership has never exceeded 7% of short-term acute care hospitals and was below 4% in 2024; (2) most PE firms exit within 5 years, typically through a sale to another PE firm or strategic acquirer, with bankruptcy and closure representing a small share; and (3) most Americans live in hospital referral regions that have no PE-owned hospitals.

These findings indicate that PE ownership continues to represent a small share of hospitals.