The thing is, asset stripping is how failing companies finance continuing operations.
If you outlaw sale and lease back, businesses and hospitals will fail sooner, but with their real estate intact. At least until they figure out that they could move into a rental and sell their existing facility, but moving facilities is very expensive for hospitals, so they'll probably not be able to afford that.
For hospitals, especially rural hospitals, I think trying to run them for economic gain just doesn't work. They're expensive, they have obligations to provide expensive care without promise of payment in many cases. Municipal hospitals seem to make a lot of sense to me, although the same communities that are having trouble with hospitals failing would likely have trouble paying for a municipal hospital as well.
> For hospitals, especially rural hospitals, I think trying to run them for economic gain just doesn't work.
In current day America it doesn't seem like anything useful is compatible with making money. From the outside, it looks like you've entirely divorced money from common good.
It is possible to make hospitals profitable, but it requires you to take control over what sorts of things you wish to make a profit.
You can just look to any well-run hospital chain to see organizations doing extremely valuable work lucratively. But many of the largest hospital chains are non-profit; in Chicago, Rush, Northwestern, UChicago, and Edwards-Elmhurst --- all of the largest chains --- are non-profit. Non-profit and rapidly expanding.
I'm not sure if I believe that story, though. Look at Sears, for example. Yes, they mostly missed the wave on e-commerce, and were on a decline ever since then. But are you really claiming Eddie Lamport didn't do anything wrong that worsened the already bad trajectory?
My claim is not that the trajectory didn't change, but that the destination didn't change.
Sears was clearly failing. Asset stripping turned a slowly failing company into a company operating normally for a period of time until it became a failed company all at once. The alternative to asset stripping would be Sears either selling off stores in chunks until it figured out how to operate profitably or became small enough to acquire; or Sears closing stores and renting them to others. Both of those strategies are hard to execute on, especially with Sears shaped stores, nobody is looking to expand into that at the scale that Sears needed to shrink.
But, for a single location hospital, you can't continue operation and let someone else use the building. If someone wants to take over operating as a hospital, that's fine... but if the hospital is consistently losing money, who wants to take over operating it? So, sell and lease back lets you keep running for a while longer.
If you outlaw sale and lease back, businesses and hospitals will fail sooner, but with their real estate intact. At least until they figure out that they could move into a rental and sell their existing facility, but moving facilities is very expensive for hospitals, so they'll probably not be able to afford that.
For hospitals, especially rural hospitals, I think trying to run them for economic gain just doesn't work. They're expensive, they have obligations to provide expensive care without promise of payment in many cases. Municipal hospitals seem to make a lot of sense to me, although the same communities that are having trouble with hospitals failing would likely have trouble paying for a municipal hospital as well.