Corporate health care gouging is worse than ever

An excellent presentation of what’s been going on for a while.

The largest corporate health care hospitals in the country are consolidating their power and using it to rip off patients, a new study from Families USA shows. Released amid the GOP’s manufactured affordability crisis, the study shows that health care executives at a handful of corporations are setting “high and irrational prices” in every state and charging patients almost three times what Medicare pays for the exact same service.

The 15 largest systems charged an average of 282 percent more than the Medicare rate, the study found, resulting in $22 million in profit per hospital per year…

The reason hospital executives can do this is because they are consolidating at a rapid clip, buying up independent providers, and jacking up prices at will. Five or fewer corporations in 42 states and the District of Columbia “controlled at least half of all hospital care in 2023,” researchers found. In almost half of all states, just three corporations controlled the majority of hospital care. Hospital executives have no competition or regulations to discipline their price-gouging, so they “can charge basically whatever they want, because they can,” said Anthony Wright, executive director of Families USA. - Tha American Prospect

Private equity will never, ever stop screwing the rest of us

Not until it’s crushed. Obliterated. Annihilated. So that’s what needs to happen.

It’s tough to pull a really representative blockquote from this one. I can only respectfully ask that you take my sincere word that you should click and read it all.

It is part of a growing trend of private equity investment in health care in the United States. 

The pandemic has put into stark relief how these billionaire investors have fundamentally weakened the health care system...

Hospital acquisitions were popular among private equity firms from 2000 to 2012. But many firms struggled to make money from those acquisitions and have turned their attention to more profitable slices of the health care economy. 

In particular, private equity has been gobbling up staffing service for emergency rooms and then taking the doctors out of the hospital’s insurance network. As a result, many people return home from the emergency room with massive bills they thought would be covered by their insurance company. This phenomenon is known as “surprise billing.” - Popular Information

Trump starts stealth attack on seniors' health care

Corporate "news" media is of course not presenting this as it should. (If, that is, it expects to still be regarded as legitimate journalism. Maybe they really have explicitly given up on that.) If you do a search, as I did just now, you'll find, likely without the slightest trace of surprise, that they're mostly just passing along the Trumpies' bullshit claims. Here's some reality:

Watch out, older Americans and people with disabilities! President Trump just announced a plan to give corporate health insurers more control over your health care. His new executive order calls for “market-based” pricing, which would drive up costs for everyone with Medicare, eviscerate traditional Medicare, and steer more people into for-profit “Medicare Advantage” plans.

Seema Verma, the Trump appointee who heads the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), may not have warned Trump about the slew of government audits revealing that many Medicare Advantage plans pose “an imminent and serious risk to the health of… enrollees.” They also overcharge taxpayers to the tune of $10 billion a year. - Independent Media Institute/AlterNet