Private Equity–Acquired Physician Practices And Market Penetration Increased Substantially, 2012–21

By Ola Abdelhadi, Brent D. Fulton, Laura Alexander, Richard M. Scheffler | Published March 2024 in Health Affairs | Link to full report.

“Private equity (PE) firms have been acquiring physician practices at an increasing rate, raising concerns about such firms’ penetration at the physician level into local markets and the impact on health care quality and prices. However, limited knowledge exists about the extent of PE firms’ control in local markets. By linking data on PE acquisitions to physician data and using full-time-equivalent physicians as the base of assessment, we estimated the local market share of each PE firm within ten physician specialties at the Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA) level.”