Congress targets private equity's health care playbook: clawbacks, REIT ban, full transparency
S. 3829 — Corporate Crimes Against Health Care Act · Filed by Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) · 4 cosponsors · Introduced Feb 11, 2026 · Referred to committee
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What it does
This bill creates criminal and civil penalties for executives and private equity firms that extract excessive compensation from health care companies before or after those companies fail—through salary clawbacks, criminal imprisonment (1–6 years), and civil fines up to 5 times the clawed-back amount. It also blocks private equity-backed real estate investment trusts (REITs) from receiving Medicare/Medicaid payments, eliminates tax breaks for REIT dividends, requires health care entities to report ownership and financial data annually to HHS, and mandates a study on profit-driven practices harming patient care and staff.
Why we flagged it
The bill's core function is to impose criminal and civil liability on private equity executives and firms for extracting compensation before health care company failures, combined with mandatory ownership/financial reporting and a study on profit-driven harm. It is fundamentally an accountability and transparency measure targeting financial engineering in health care.
What the text implies
- The 10-year lookback/lookforward window for clawbacks may capture compensation earned years before a triggering event, creating retroactive liability exposure for executives who left the firm long before failure.
- The REIT prohibition (Section 3–5) eliminates a major tax-advantaged financing structure used by private equity in health care real estate, potentially raising capital costs for PE-backed health systems and affecting their ability to refinance.
The full analysis lists 5 implications of this text.
Who stands to gain
health care workers and employees (wage recovery, pension protection); patients and communities (via enforcement against destabilizing financial extraction); state attorneys general (enforcement authority and recovered funds)