> Then a PE company came in and offered a ton of money which was an offer he couldn’t resist.

He is going to retire sooner or later and what then?

There is a cultural paradox where it's socially unacceptable to profit too much from a necessary good or service, but you can profit as much as you want from non-necessary goods and services. In the past, this pressured small practices to keep their service standards high and prices relatively low. However, due to the accessibility of information and finance, rather than start your own medical practice, you can become similarly wealthy with half the work just by being employed as a doctor/dentist and investing your money in an ETF. Of course, people with money swoop in to "correct" the mismatch in supply and demand, which leads to worse service and higher prices.

The knee jerk reaction people have towards these situations is to "punish greed", but that doesn't change the underlying market forces. Much like rent control, it may work in the short term but makes the problem worse in the long term.

You claimed:

> Usually when a company sells to private equity, it is because the business is suffering from financial hardship or the current owner is unable to continue to run the business and cannot find a successor, so selling to private equity would be the least bad option.

private equity being able to offer more money for your practice when you retire than a dentist who would have continued the small practice is not financial hardship or being unable to find a successor, so please don't pretend your two comments are equivalent.

This comment is much more honest: there was room for financialization, so people did it. They were unable to find a successor who would pay more than a group of people that wanted to wring money out of their company. Gives the lie to the "selling to private equity would be the least bad option" conclusion, though.

You wrote

"it is because the business is suffering from financial hardship or the current owner is unable to continue to run the business and cannot find a successor, so selling to private equity would be the least bad option."

It should be

"PE offered by far the most money and will make up for it by raising prices and reducing service"

That's exactly what happened with that dentist practice. For years I went there, got a cleaning and was told "keep doing what you are doing". After the takeover they found some problem with almost every visit and fixing it coincidentally would have cost exactly the $1500 my insurance was covering each year.

An act being incentivized doesn't make it good, only more likely to occur. Both the act and the incentives can be opposed.