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Welcome to The Corner. In this issue, we discuss the need to protect the child care industry from private equity powers looking for quick profit, particularly with an increase in public subsidies to support the critical sector.
The Growing Fight to Protect Public Support for Care from Private Equity
In March, the Massachusetts senate passed a bill expanding state subsidies for childcare that would increase public support to this industry but included a provision preventing any one private provider from receiving more than 1% of this funding. Although neutral in its wording, this provision takes direct aim at the private equity (PE) funds who own eight of the 10 largest chains in this industry, opening a new front in a growing fight to reign in the excesses of private equity. PE firms, like Bain Capital and
Apollo Global pool wealthy clients’ money into funds, buy control of a portfolio of companies, restructure these companies to maximize their profits - often by loading them with debt, and then sell them off to the highest bidder within three to five years. This is often done with little to no regard for the long-term health of these companies, let alone their workers,
customers, creditors, or suppliers. In the last year, various federal agencies have locked horns with PE in a fight over the scope of their powers to regulate these investors. For example, a new Securities and Exchange Commission rule requiring PE funds to regularly disclose their fees and performance to investors was recently struck down by a federal appellate court. Meanwhile, the PE owner of an anesthesiology chain that was recently sued by the Federal Trade Commission for anti-competitive practices
has managed to wriggle free from any responsibility after a federal judge dismissed them from the case. A second wave of fighting has emerged as - on an industry-by-industry basis - government officials and legislators move to patch some of the regulatory loopholes exploited by PE. In April, the Biden Administration set new minimum staffing requirements for nursing homes after PE ownership was found to increase fatalities in this sector. And earlier this month Senators Elizabeth Warren and Ed Markey introduced a bill empowering regulators to claw back money from PE funds that financially harmed their health care portfolio companies. The Massachusetts childcare funding
restriction represents a new line of protection against private equity—one that promotes market competition as a means of preventing PE funds from profiteering from taxpayer money. The policy debates in child care are thus of immense significance to the varied sectors receiving public funding as part of the revival of industrial policy in the U.S. In its most basic form, industrial policy is about the role of government in shaping private markets to achieve public priorities. However, policies that provide critical public funding to the private sector through programs like Medicaid, as in the 2010 Affordable Care Act, or through subsidies, as in the 2021 Inflation Reduction Act, have routinely—and inadvertently—created the market conditions that attracted PE funds to industries such as nursing homes, autism
services, and even heat pump installation. Private equity then goes on to profit from this public funding, usually while undermining at least some of the priorities that this money was intended to promote. Childcare advocates thus worry that PE investors will undermine their efforts to structure markets to encourage private businesses to provide high-quality childcare at a reasonable cost, to help make the service both universally accessible and
affordable. Public funding is key to achieving this vision, since it is the only means to bridge the mismatch between the true cost of providing childcare and ability of many working families to pay for this service. Since PE funds and PE-backed chains have greater access to external financing, they will be among the best placed actors to rapidly expand into new communities if childcare funding increases. One fear is that rather than using their money to invest in new supply, PE funds will instead prioritize growth through roll-ups of smaller programs. Many existing programs are vulnerable to acquisition, often because they lack the resources to stabilize their cash flow. New
programs created in response to increased public funding could also be targets for PE acquisition, since the venture capital and growth equity funds most likely to finance new enterprises will want to sell them to the highest bidder within a few years. The Massachusetts funding bill is one step in the direction of monitoring and protecting market competition. Given how most roll-up acquisitions are too small to be reported to competition regulators, industry regulators must learn to
proactively monitor local market concentration levels, and to collaborate with states attorneys general and federal regulators to catch and punish anti-competitive actors. Policymakers should also consider ways to support small businesses to reduce their incentives to sell to PE-backed chains, such as by providing better cash flow support. They should also get creative in finding ways to support alternative buyers, such as worker co-ops, to keep the programs on the market out of private equity hands. In childcare, as in other industries, the fight to convince policymakers about the importance of public funding may be coming to an end. But the fight to determine the impact of this funding has just begun.
The Open Markets Institute and The Guardian US will host a conference next week on June 27 at the Press Club in Washington on America’s information crisis and solutions to the problem. Speakers will include European Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager, U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai, Federal Communications Commission Chair Jessica Rosenworcel, and Jonathan Kanter, assistant attorney general for antitrust at the Department of Justice. It will also include comments by Sen. Elizabeth Warren, Sen. Amy Klobuchar, and others. The discussion will focus on ways to bolster the supply of trustworthy journalism, address the problem of tech platforms manipulating and censoring what individuals read, and stop corporations from taking the work of journalists and publishers without compensation. The timing of our event could not be more critical, with vitally important elections this year in the U.S., UK, Europe, and more than 50 countries around the world. RSVP for the event here.
The Open Markets Institute, National Women’s Law Center, and Community Change will convene policymakers and advocates on Monday, June 24, for an all-day event, “Children Before Profits: Addressing the Risks of Private Equity in the Child Care Industry,” to discuss how to protect the childcare industry from destructive forms of private equity investment. The event comes at a time when PE funds are disrupting industries from nursing homes to family doctors’ practices, mainly by rolling up independent service providers into large corporate chains. The event will take place in Washington D.C. at the Eaton Hotel. Please RSVP for the event here.
Open Markets Hosted “Too Big to Feed” Roundtable on Consolidation of Food Industry Open Markets Institute last week hosted a virtual roundtable, “Too Big to Feed: The Threats of Corporate Consolidation on the Food Supply” with panelists Eric Schlosser, producer of Food Inc. 2 and author of Fast Food Nation; Max Miller, attorney advisor to Federal Trade Commissioner Alvaro Bedoya; and OMI food program manager Claire Kelloway. The panelists spoke about how corporate consolidation puts food workers and consumers at risk and discussed recent efforts by the Federal Trade Commission, Department of Justice, and the Department of Agriculture to challenge unfair and deceptive practices, such as new merger guidelines, enforcement of the Robinson-Patman Act, and new Packers and Stockyards rules. Marcia Brown, food and agriculture reporter for POLITICO, moderated the discussion. Watch the roundtable here. 📝 WHAT WE'VE BEEN UP TO:
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We appreciate your readership. Please consider making a contribution to support the continued publication of this newsletter. 📈 VITAL STAT:$3 trillionThe value of Nvidia’s market capitalization, currently the world’s largest. Currently under regulatory scrutiny for its dominance, Nvidia has cornered 80% of the AI chip market, which includes the custom AI processors made by cloud computing companies like Google, Microsoft and Amazon, enabling its gross margins of 70% to 80%. (Reuters) 📚 WHAT WE'RE READING:When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s — Journalist John Ganz traces the rise of the modern populist right to the 1990s, a decade that saw the end of Reaganism, the demise of the Soviet Union, and the first wave of insurgents like Ross Perot and Pat Buchanan. As he traces the major political developments of the decade, Ganz makes a compelling argument that the bipartisan consensus on deregulation and free trade that emerged in the 90s sowed the seeds of cultural resentment and alienation that define conservatism today. 🔎 TIPS? COMMENTS? SUGGESTIONS? We would love to hear from you—just reply to this e-mail and drop us a line. Give us your feedback, alert us to competition policy news, or let us know your favorite story from this issue. |