Huge costs for privatized Medicare and Medicaid

This is not meant to be critical of seniors who choose Medicare Advantage plans. They have the right to find the best deals for themselves. But the current system is clearly not viable for much longer.

US President Donald Trump and his Republican allies in Congress took a sledgehammer to Medicaid over the summer, justifying the unprecedented cuts by falsely claiming the program that provides health coverage to tens of millions of low-income Americans is overrun with waste and abuse.

But a new paper published Friday in the journal Health Affairs argues that if the administration actually wanted to target waste, fraud, and abuse, it would have been much better off taking aim at Medicare Advantage (MA) and Medicaid privatization.

The paper’s authors estimate that overpayments to MA plans—which are funded by the government and run by for-profit insurers—and private Medicaid managed care will likely cost US taxpayers a total of $1.92 trillion over the next 10 years. - Common Dreams

U.S. still brings up the rear on healthcare

Among "developed" nations. I have yet to see a more apt phrase than "profits over people" to descibe what's wrong.

A report out Thursday shows that the United States' for-profit healthcare system still ranks dead last among peer nations on key metrics, including access to care and health outcomes such as life expectancy at birth.

The new analysis from the Commonwealth Fund is the latest indictment of a corporate-dominated system that leaves tens of millions of people uninsured or underinsured and unable to afford life-saving medications without rationing doses or going into debt.

"Despite spending a lot on healthcare, the United States is not meeting one of the principal obligations of a nation: to protect the health and welfare of its residents," the report states. "Most of the countries we compared are providing this protection, even though each can learn a good deal from its peers. The U.S., in failing this ultimate test of a successful nation, remains an outlier." - Common Dreams

Profiteering is indeed a big part of inflation

Actually, you'd have had to be awfully gullible to ever believe that it was all about "market forces."

A new report from progressive UK.-based think-tanks IPPR and Common Wealth says profiteering played a major role in jacking up prices far above the rise in costs, reinforcing a previous but narrower study showing such an impact. Among other things, the researchers called for a global corporation tax to curtail unrestrained profits...

Giant energy companies, mining companies, and monopolistic food companies all saw their profits leap ahead of inflation after the February 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. The report noted, “Because energy and food prices feed so significantly into costs across all sectors of the wider economy, this exacerbated the initial price shock—contributing to inflation peaking higher and lasting longer than had there been less market power.”

Technology companies, telecommunications, and banking also raised their profit margins with big price hikes. “Such companies have been able to protect their profit margins or even increase them, generating excess profits through a combination of high market power and global market dynamics,” the report said. - Daily Kos

Yes, it's past time to start getting rid of the bosses

But making it happen is proving to be very challenging. That's no reason to give up, though.

Do our corporate CEOs deserve all those millions they annually pocket? Can a modern economy somehow survive without the “incentive” these mega millions provide? Do we, in effect, need our top corporate bosses pocketing more in a day than their workers can take home in a year?

We’ve been asking — as a society — questions like these ever since CEO paychecks started soaring in the late 1970s. Back in the 1960s, America’s CEOs averaged about 20 times what their workers were taking home. Today’s CEOs, analysts at the Economic Policy Institute detailed last October, routinely pocket 400 times and more what their workers are making...

But that executive greed — despite the spotlight on it — seems as entrenched as ever. And that reality has some analysts going beyond attacking how much our corporate chiefs execs make. These critics are increasingly wondering whether we need these chiefs at all. - CounterPunch

Death to for-profit health care

This is from the lead article in The American Prospect's current issue, which is devoted to this country's profits way, way before people health care system.

The problem is, because the country essentially lacks any institutions designed to broadly improve public health, our medical advances are funneled through a veritable gauntlet of gatekeepers, distributors, middlemen, subcontractors, loophole-exploiters, conglomerates, and monopolies, all under the watchful eye of Wall Street investors. Managing a hospital or clinic today requires hiring an ever-mushrooming cadre of lobbyists, consultants, and contractors to navigate this confusing new world. The science of health care points to a bright future; the business of health care points directly backwards...

Where is the money for the most expensive health care system in the world going? The cut of gross national health care expenditures commanded by administrative overhead and waste has ballooned to an estimated 30 percent; the portion that pays doctors and nurses has fallen. Experts estimate that fraud comprises at least $10 of every $100 the U.S. government spends each year on health care. And how much does the government spend policing that fraud? In 2021, that figure was two cents, according to the HHS inspector general. Wealth extraction has become so normalized in American health care, it can barely be considered illegal. - The American Prospect

Corporations are still abusing NAFTA

I hadn't known about this "legacy" crap.

International investment treaties and investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) play increasingly prominent roles in debates about the climate crisis and government efforts to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions. Around the world, states and international governance bodies are warming to the understanding that investment treaties threaten progress on decarbonization, sustainable development, and the achievement of human rights. Even in places where countries have taken steps to roll back ISDS, as in North America with the passage of the US-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USCMA), corporate lawsuits against democratically enacted energy and climate policies continue to put a chill on government action.

This report looks at three such cases launched in the past two years against Canada, the United States, and Mexico under the expiring ISDS process in the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). These disparate cases include: TC Energy’s $15 billion challenge to the Biden administration’s cancellation of the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline; a dispute from Koch Industries involving the cancellation of cap-and-trade in the Canadian province of Ontario; and about a half dozen energy- and mining-related ISDS cases from Canadian and US firms against Mexico, of which we will highlight the Finley Resources case.

What unites these ISDS cases, besides their links to energy and climate policy, is that they should not have been possible to begin with. They can only move forward because of a “legacy” provision that temporarily extended NAFTA’s Chapter 11 investment provisions in the replacement USMCA. - IATP

There's still a long way to go on fixing health care in this country

I suspect that just continuing to allow greedheads to run amok is not what most people support.

In what advocates call a “grotesque display of corporate profiteering,” the health insurance giant formerly known as Anthem reported making $2.3 billion in net profit off its policyholders over the past three months as analysts predict a dramatic spike in the cost of health insurance premiums in 2023.

Elevance Health, the largest for-profit company within the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association, surpassed Wall Street expectations on Wednesday and reported nearly $40 billion in revenue during the third quarter of 2022. Returns to shareholders increased by 7 percent, generating $1.6 billion in profits for investors. Elevance provides health coverage for 118 million people across multiple states.

Elevance claims its profits are the result of offering more service to more customers. However, health care activists who help patients fight for coverage from their insurance providers say a chunk of this profit undoubtably comes from denying insurance claims from sick people who cannot afford proper care otherwise. Denying claims, they say, is a “regular business practice” for squeezing out extra profits. Insurers know the vast majority of patients do not exercise their right to appeal when claims are denied and are often unsure how to do so. - Truthout

Beating down SLAPP lawsuits

Minnesota is a state that still needs anti-SLAPP legislation that can survive court challenges.

(Krystal) Two Bulls is just one of many victims of the fossil fuel industry’s use of SLAPPs — strategic lawsuits against public participation — to silence and intimidate its critics. A report released last month by legal advocacy nonprofit EarthRights International identified 152 instances of legal and judicial harassment by fossil fuel corporations to suppress dissent in the United States over the past 10 years, including 93 SLAPP lawsuits.

Just (two weeks ago), a California oil industry trade association paid nearly $650,000 in fees to the city of Los Angeles and several environmental advocacy groups the company had targeted in court for years following the city’s implementation of new environmental safety requirements for drilling applicants. After declaring bankruptcy, the California Independent Petroleum Association was allowed to pay only a fraction of a judgment initially awarded to the city and groups by a trial court that ruled the lawsuit was a SLAPP.

“With the strengthening of our movements, the revelation of how long the fossil fuel industry has been aware of how their practices impact and contribute to climate change, and the rise of legal cases against oil and gas corporations, these companies are becoming more desperate to silence the voices of their critics,” said Deepa Padmanabha, deputy general counsel at Greenpeace USA. - DeSmog

Getting it together on inflation

This is really good, from a progressive perspective, on where the issue is at. My only quibble with it is, the first thing I'd like to see is the most egregious corporate players brought up on criminal charges (collusion, market manipulation).

It's worth watching, right now, as to whether Big Oil tries to use the pending hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico to run up gas prices in order to, along with shameless greedhead profiteering, influence the upcoming election.

Yet conservative economic theory, like that trumpeted by Friedman, still drives the story we hear repeated ad nauseam in mainstream discussions of inflation: increased wages and government spending are to blame. Only the Federal Reserve can beat inflation by ​“cooling” the economy. The government’s only role is to refrain from substantive spending.

Biden could have invoked executive powers to institute targeted price controls and invest in production, but he didn’t. Instead, the Federal Reserve is hiking interest rates, and the administration’s landmark social spending bill, Build Back Better, got whittled down and reframed into the Inflation Reduction Act, which includes some positive gains (like corporate taxes and reduced drug prices) but operates within the confines of conservative monetary justifications.

To articulate and fight for an alternative solution to inflation, we need to radically shift the economic discourse to the left. - In These Times

Trump's handouts to the corporate greedheads

The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy crunched numbers regarding the Trump corporate tax cut, often noted as his only signifiicant legislative "achievement."

ITEP’s examination of Fortune 500 companies’ financial filings identifies 379 companies that were profitable in 2018 and that provided enough information to calculate effective federal income tax rates, which is the share of 2018 pretax profits they paid in federal income taxes in that year. This report only includes companies that were profitable in 2018 and would thus be expected to owe income tax for that year. (The corporate income tax is a tax on profits.)

For most of these companies, their effective federal income tax rate was much lower than the statutory corporate tax rate of 21 percent. This is by design.

When drafting the tax law, lawmakers could have eliminated special breaks and loopholes in the corporate tax to offset the cost of reducing the statutory rate. Instead, the new law introduced many new breaks and loopholes, though it eliminated some old ones. The unsurprising result: Profitable American corporations in 2018 collectively paid an average effective federal income tax rate of 11.3 percent on their 2018 income, barely more than half the 21 percent statutory tax rate. - ITEP