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but the truth is that comparing what private equity firms used to be—and where the perception of private equity still sits in many quarters—to what they are now is like comparing a Motorola cellphone from the 1990s to the latest iPhone. There’s a world of differences; it’s not even close. For pension funds and other investors in private equity funds, the firms they back gives them access to investment opportunities they can’t find or execute themselves. What’s more, they get consistent investment returns out of these opportunities, whether they include leveraged buyouts, credit investments, infrastructure assets, essential utilities, real estate transactions, technology deals, natural resources projects, banks, insurance companies, or life science opportunities. They can buy companies, carve out businesses, build up companies through acquisitions and organic growth, spin off businesses, take companies private from the public market, buy businesses from other funds they manage, draw margin loans to finance dividends, and refinance the capital structure pre-exit. And more besides.

For interested consumers, there are many health pricing tools. For starters, I recommend The Wall Street Journal’s “Medicare Unmasked” tools,2 although they may be behind a paywall. The Health Care Cost Institute3 is a health-insurer funded effort to compare the cost of various procedures around the country.4 ProPublica, a non-profit news site, is one of several consumer sites that has used the CMS databases to build tools that are not exactly beloved by health care providers, including Dollars for Docs5 and Surgeon Scorecard.6

Under the headline, “Bribe Culture Seeps Into South Texas,” the Houston Chronicle described how payoffs have become common, everywhere from school districts to building inspections to municipal courts. The bribe—la mordida—as a way of life is moving north. Anthony Knopp, who teaches border history at the University of Texas at Brownsville, said that as America becomes more Hispanic, “corruption will show up here, naturally.” The same thing is happening in California. Small towns south of Los Angeles, such as South Gate, Lynwood, Bell Gardens, Maywood, Huntington Park, and Vernon were once white suburbs but have become largely Hispanic. They have also become notorious for thieving, bribe-taking politicians. Mayors, city council members, and treasurers have paraded off to jail. “When new groups come to power, and become entrenched … then they tend to rule it as a fiefdom,” explained Jaime Regalado, of California State University, Los Angeles. Maywood, which was 96 percent Hispanic by 2010, was so badly run it lost insurance coverage and had to lay off all its employees. The California Joint Powers Insurance Authority (JPIA), composed of more than 120 cities and other public agencies to share insurance costs, declared the Maywood government too risky to insure. It was the first time in its 32-year history that the JPIA had ever terminated a member. It has been reported that black elected officials are 5.3 times more likely to be arrested for crimes than white elected officials. Comparative arrest figures for Hispanic officials are not available. Hispanics may be especially susceptible to corruption if they work along the US-Mexico border. There are no comprehensive data on this problem, but incidents reported in just one year —2005 are disturbing. Operation Lively Green was an FBI drug smuggling sting that led to 33 guilty pleas. Twenty-four of the guilty were Hispanic and most of the rest were black. All were police officers, port inspectors, prison guards, or soldiers. They waved drug shipments through ports, prevented seizures by the Border Patrol, and sold fake citizenship documents.