If your employer sends you an email telling you to quote, get that money, you probably work in sales, right? Maybe you're a real estate agent. But what if I told you

I'm talking about an email that went out to doctors?

NBC News Financial reporter Gretchen Morganson heard about this a few years ago.

My background is on Wall Street and this all sounded very familiar to me, you know, about encouraging people to make sales, you know, to make a quota, you know, at the end of the month or something. That's a very Wall Street thing to do.

The email was shared with Gretchen by a dermatologist in Michigan named

Allison Brown. Dr. Brown's office had recently been bought out by a private

equity firm and the firm was pushing doctors to book more patients to meet budget goals,

offering up bonuses if they succeeded.

The effort to do sales was part of a larger shift in care

that Dr Brown noticed once private equity took over.

She had had to see so many more patients every day and she didn't have the adequate support staff to see those patients.

She also described cases of patients seen multiple times for a problem that could have been

resolved in a single visit. Now that of course raises those

patients costs. But this isn't just happening in Dr Brown's former office in

Michigan or just in dermatology.

Around the country, private equity is buying up doctor's

offices, clinics, and hospitals, hoping to turn a profit

in an industry where the stakes are literally life or death.

My reporting has found that 40% of emergency departments in hospitals are run by private equity staffing companies.

11% of nursing homes are owned by private equity.

And that is probably a low number

because there are sort of hidden ownership of nursing homes the way they're structured.

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