Murphy Publishes New Report Exposing Trump’s Corrupt Alliance With Private Equity, Introduces Legislation To Boot Private Equity From Health Care

WASHINGTON-U.S. Senator Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) on Monday released, Aided and Abetted: How the Trump Administration is Helping Private Equity Take Over Health Care. The new report uncovers how the Trump administration mobilized the federal government, through legislation, rulemaking, and relaxed enforcement, to give handouts to one of the most destructive forces in American health care today: private equity. Murphy traces Trump's giveaways to private equity to a corrupt, multimillion-dollar lobbying and donation campaign from the industry to buy influence with the administration and advances several policy proposals to curb private equity's deadly impact on our health care.

In the report, Murphy details how President Trump's unprecedented cuts to health care and Medicaid in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act opened the floodgates for private equity to dominate our health care system by gifting the industry new tax deductions to boost profits, and crippling revenue streams for health care providers nationwide. As hundreds of financially strained health care providers have been forced to either slash services or close their doors because of Trump's draconian cuts, they have become perfect targets for private equity's predatory takeovers - a disaster for patients and providers alike.

Despite the overwhelming evidence that private equity-owned nursing homes chronically understaff their facilities to cut costs - resulting in poor patient care and substantially higher mortality rates - Trump rolled back a Biden-era measure to ensure adequate staffing at nursing homes, and appointed an avowed defender of private equity, Andrew Ferguson, as Chair of the Federal Trade Commission. Murphy highlights how the FTC has since reversed non-compete clause protections, enabling private-equity firms to coerce health care workers into staying in their jobs, despite miserable working conditions and low pay.

In conjunction with this report, Murphy is also partnering with U.S. Representative Mary Gay Scanlon (D-Pa.-5) to introduce two new bills, the Taking Back Our Hospitals Act, and the Patient Safety and Whistleblower Protections Act, to ban private equity from owning hospitals and nursing homes, and to protect whistleblower employees at private equity-owned health care facilities who report misconduct and neglect.

The report made the following policy proposals to reduce private equity's chokehold on our health care system:

• Ban private equity ownership of hospitals and nursing homes.
• Give workers federal protection when they report patient safety concerns.
• Reinstate the Biden nursing home rule.
• Crack down on private equity rollups.
• Change tax policies that favor private equity.
• Rally around the Health Over Wealth Act and Corporate Crimes Against Health Care Act.

Murphy has emerged as one of the U.S. Senate's leading voices against private equity's increasing dominance of American health care. This report builds on Murphy's previous report, A Dangerous Prospect: How Private Equity Decimated Connecticut Hospitals, chronicling how private equity employed a deliberately destructive 'buy, strip, flip' model and reaped millions in profits as they devastated three hospitals in Connecticut.

The full report is available here.