equity firms are good”, then search for “why private equity firms are bad”. You won’t find anything talking about how PE is good and you will find a lot talking about the negative affects of PE. I know that isn’t scientific of itself, but it’s telling.

Other people have said what I think. PE firms are great for an owner’s exit strategy. They care about their own financial returns, and very often that is at the expense of employees and the company itself. I personally know that healthcare outcomes are noticeably worse for healthcare companies owned by PE firms.

The NYT has this to say about them:

Companies bought by private equity firms are far more likely to go bankrupt than companies that aren’t. Over the last decade, private equity firms were responsible for nearly 600,000 job losses in the retail sector alone. In nursing homes, where the firms have been particularly active, private equity ownership is responsible for an estimated — and astounding — 20,000 premature deaths over a 12-year period, according to a recent working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research. Similar tales of woe abound in mobile homes, prison health care, emergency medicine, ambulances, apartment buildings and elsewhere. Yet private equity and its leaders continue to prosper, and executives of the top firms are billionaires many times over.
Why do private equity firms succeed when the companies they buy so often fail? In part, it’s because firms are generally insulated from the consequences of their actions, and benefit from hard-fought tax benefits that allow many of their executives to often pay lower rates than you and I do. Together, this means that firms enjoy disproportionate benefits when their plans succeed, and suffer fewer consequences when they fail.