Very well put. And this has been going on for a while. A decade ago the NYT had a great article on how private equity destroyed Simmons Mattress: https://archive.is/uGYrT
And you're right that the effects are obscured. I happened to be talking with an optometrist earlier this year. He and his partners sold their practice to a PE firm on the promise of making everything better. But he had started to moonlight at somebody else's non-PE practice because the PE overlords kept making things both worse and more expensive for the patients, and less and less satisfying for the doctors. And all of this was explained in a hush-hush tone, presumably because there were NDAs involved.
And you're right that the effects are obscured. I happened to be talking with an optometrist earlier this year. He and his partners sold their practice to a PE firm on the promise of making everything better. But he had started to moonlight at somebody else's non-PE practice because the PE overlords kept making things both worse and more expensive for the patients, and less and less satisfying for the doctors. And all of this was explained in a hush-hush tone, presumably because there were NDAs involved.