It’s hard to despise the opening ceremony of the June 10 Obama Presidential Center event enough. The fact that it was held on a day commemorating the abolition of slavery in the United States despite Obama’s destruction of black property, the takeover of public parks, the ugliness of the buildings, the oligarchy that paid for it, the deaf-mute tone that delights in throwing celebrity-filled self-congratulatory parties even as the world burns, and the sequel to the family blog W. Michelle Altoiz.
And the never-ending argument that all would be well in the world if we just wiped out the current monster in the White House and went back to the way things were.
Let’s get back to this sometime, America. pic.twitter.com/25GZ6DHUB3
— Protect Kamala Harris ✊ (@DisavowTrump20) June 18, 2026
To rebut this type of argument, let’s start with another incident that happened about 15 miles outside of Chicago in the lead up to Juneteenth. This tells the story of Obama and the Democratic Party better than all the rebellious royal extravaganzas in the Crusader fortress of Jackson Park.
On June 11, the Chicago suburb of Oak Park closed West Suburban Medical Center after the hospital’s last functioning elevator broke down. Firefighters had to be called in to help patients stranded on the upper floors. More from the Chicago Tribune:
The owners of the company that operates West Suburban abruptly closed the hospital in March, but some health care providers not involved in the hospital’s operations still used the building.
The dialysis clinic, which serves about 140 patients a week on the fifth floor of the hospital’s specialty building, remained open, and the PCC Community Wellness Center continued to operate three clinics there.
They left Thursday after Oak Park closed the building to the public. Jacobsen said only security and maintenance personnel are currently allowed inside the building.
“We’re basically rushing to transport 140 patients,” said Dr. George Naratadam, a nephrologist at West Suburban Hospital. “You can’t miss dialysis, otherwise you could die.”
Naratadam said dialysis patients currently have to go to various dialysis facilities in the region, which are far from their homes and may not be available during normal hours. Patients typically have to undergo dialysis three times a week for four hours each time.
West Suburban’s sad end comes after private equity depletes and then scraps the facility. Like other Chicago-area hospitals, Wythe Memorial (closed last year) and Westlake (closed in 2019), West Suburban was at one time owned by Pipeline Health, a private equity-backed hospital chain. Pipeline still holds $67 million in subordinated debt related to the extensive hospital operations of Resilience Healthcare, which acquired West Suburban in 2022 with landlord Ramco Healthcare Holdings.
Ramco, Resilience, Pipeline, and another Miami private equity firm, Rialto Capital Advisors, are currently engaged in a messy legal battle over tens of millions of dollars while patients suffer.
But there’s no need to worry. The Real Deal assures you that the legal battles in the western suburbs are not representative of the attractiveness of health care as an investment across the Chicago region.
This dire situation stands in contrast to the broader situation in Chicago’s medical real estate sector, where demand for medical office properties remains high. Against the backdrop of an aging population and inventory shortages, investors are looking at clinical space as a haven from the traditional office recession, with local healthcare transaction value exceeding $600 million this year.
And there will certainly be more western suburbs in the not-too-distant future. But, my poor patients, there is no need to fear. A ray of hope is shining now.
🚨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 ray of hope.
So what is the relationship between President Obama, a concrete monolith, and dialysis patients evacuated from medical facilities run down by private equity?
The failures of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) are well documented, but it’s worth remembering that the ACA helped pave the way for an expanded role for private equity in health care, just as President Obama’s response to the foreclosure crisis enabled private equity to buy up cheap homes and rent them out to us.
Private equity has been active in the healthcare sector for a long time, but it really took off after 2010. Check out University of Chicago Business Law reviews while staying in the Windy City.
Mergers and acquisitions among healthcare organizations are common ways to increase efficiency to increase revenue, reduce costs, and improve patient care. 10 This is reflected in the dramatic increase in hospital consolidation over the past 30 years. 11In 1990, 65% of metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs) had highly concentrated hospital markets (hospitals with HHI greater than 2,500); in 2006, that proportion was 77%.12 These deals are made on the assumption that large-scale processing is necessary to reduce costs.
The federal government’s Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) further encouraged this goal of improving patient care at lower costs through the Affordable Care Act (ACA), enacted in 2010. 13 The ACA aimed to reward hospitals for improving patient outcomes and reducing costs 14 . This motivated hospital mergers because hospitals needed to share the costs of the ACA-required deliverables of mergers, including improvements in quality of care15. It also increased overall revenue by encouraging hospitals to buy physician practices and moving patient care to outpatient clinics, increasing hospitals’ “outpatient revenue and retention.”[ing] 16 Consolidation has preserved revenue from different patient visits within a single hospital system. From 2015 to 2016, more than 5,000 physician practices were acquired by hospitals, demonstrating the desirability of this strategy.17 PE firms’ investments in healthcare have become one of the many ways the industry has incorporated over the past few decades.18 Healthcare has It is a desirable industry for investment, with high profit potential leading to a high return on investment for companies.
Not surprisingly, private financial structures, debt leverage, and asset stripping were not covered by the ACA.
The shift to more care coordination and management efforts has also been accompanied by an increase in “information sharing” that can be exploited for price manipulation. The ACA expanded loopholes in the Clinton-era Sherman Antitrust Act. In 1993, First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton and other officials announced measures to make health care more “accessible” and “affordable” for all Americans.
This policy statement established an antitrust “safe zone” that created a situation in which the Department of Justice and the FTC would not object to:
Hospital mergers. Hospital joint ventures involving high-tech or other expensive medical equipment. Providing information to purchasers of medical services by physicians. Hospital participation in the exchange of price and cost information. Group purchasing arrangements between health care providers. Physician Network Joint Venture.
The rule was further promulgated in 1996 and again in 2011 under the Obama administration’s Affordable Care Act and its Accountable Care Organization provisions. According to the Justice Department, this is why the Clintons revealed their “safe zone.”
This policy statement will help reduce uncertainty within the healthcare industry and facilitate the implementation of mergers and joint ventures, resulting in lower healthcare costs.
How did it go?
But even worse is an economic termite infestation. Matt Stoller explains in his article about the merger of private equity-owned Qualtrics and Press Gainey Forsta. These are the two largest companies that offer so-called Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (HCAHPS) surveys.
So why does this HCAHPS study exist? It’s not really about improving health care, but rather trying to support the private rationing that pervades American health care in the name of “value-based care.” As I pointed out last December, the point of Obamacare and previous reforms such as the Bush administration’s Medicare changes was to check doctors’ ability to provide drugs and treatments to patients, given the hundreds of billions of dollars in overtreatment caused by doctors’ desire to hand out drugs like candy.
At the time, there was research suggesting that overtreatment was the root cause of excessive costs in American medical care, so the idea was to put a stop to overtreatment by intervening in the decisions of doctors and patients. Such rationing cannot be done directly by the government health system. Because that would be communism. Therefore, health policy will not come up with this alternative model. As a senior government official named Doug Elmendorf testified before Congress in support of the ACA in 2009, the idea was to avoid “explicit rationing” of treatments and instead allow rationing to “occur as a result of market mechanisms.” So, civilian communism, which is obviously totally cool.
Hospitals, clinicians and others would no longer be paid based on the treatment they provide, but would receive a lump sum to manage patients. The less you spend on that patient, the more money you keep. Still, problems remained with this “value-based care” model. How do you measure whether someone is actually getting the care they need? One answer has been for governments to impose quality metrics and provide bonuses based on those metrics. The HCAHPS survey is one indicator for hospitals. (Such metrics abound, and nonsense attempts to justify value-based care occur throughout the industry.)
Today, the old model in which clinicians simply charged for services and treatments was not perfect, but relied on professional judgment and training. Value-based care models are just playing around with financial metrics. And of course, communism cannot have the government investigate directly because the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services approves the list of vendors. These vendors have integrated their products into hospital workflows and billing departments, making it difficult to switch research providers. This sounds like classic economic termite, but it is a tiny, almost invisible cost increase hidden within economic growth. And now Qualtrics and Press Gainey are merging, as antitrust enforcement regarding mergers is more limited. Hooray!
Hooray, really. It’s easy to see how Obama was able to raise nearly $1 billion for this monster in Michigan. Let’s see who is calling. Marty Nesbitt, Obama’s former national campaign treasurer, is the president of the Obama Foundation. He is co-founder and co-CEO of Vistoria Group, a Chicago-based private equity firm. Demond Martin, a partner at Adage Capital Management, leads fundraising for the Obama Foundation.
Now that some state legislators are finally acknowledging the scourge of private equity in health care (79 bills have been introduced in 25 states to address the problem), we’ll see how that plays out.
Seventeen years after the ACA was passed and ten years after President Obama left office, Democrats continue to pretend that their governance wasn’t disastrous for most Americans.
And while they may want to make the Obama Center look like a beacon of hope, it also looks more like a shrine to more sophisticated war criminals in foreign wars and domestic class wars. But hey, at least they share an altoid.
