By the way, United Healthcare plays similar games. Per the ACA, health insurance profits are capped at 15%. So they vertically integrate. A good chunk of their “in network” providers are UHC paying themselves in one way or another.

The company I got laid off from was owned by private equity. They insisted we spend a shitton (as in, a literal multimullion dollar contract) with another company they own that does data processing, but the best part is absolutely nobody seemed to know exactly what data they were supposed to be finding what information in so it was just call after call of people kicking it around management failing to give actual direction for the project

And the responsibility - its going to stain the resumes of the higher management of the victim company that they had a good company and it deteriorated under their management.

Fuck, seems like the only way to guard against these takeover-enshittify attacks is to never go public or take anybody elses money - and in that case they’ll just fuck your competitor, use them to undercut you and take your clients and run you out of business, and then run THEM to the ground.