To Shield Corporate Healthcare Crooks, US Anoints COVID the Lone Perp

Why does the U.S. with 5% of the world’s population have the highest rates of COVID sickness and death? Is it all a consequence of a two-year run of COVID as US leaders would have you believe? Not by a long shot. A profit-making corporate enterprise masquerading as healthcare is the real villain. Its unmatched defects —the highest maternal mortality in the world, nearly the highest infant mortality rate [33^rd out of 36 OECD countries], the lowest life expectancy rate at age 60, an obesity rate twice that of other developed countries and the highest number of chronic diseases sufferers — have been accumulating for decades.

Since the 1980s private companies, particularly private equity firms, have hungrily eyed the profit opportunities in a $4 trillion healthcare system, a stunning 20% of U.S. GDP. The only exception — public health agencies that have managed to fly under the takeover radar. They have not emerged unscathed however. Although key to addressing the massive needs engendered by a pandemic, they have been woefully underfunded for years. More than three-quarters of Americans live in states that spend less than $100 per person annually on public health [Kaiser Health News]. Often, even public health funds that have been appropriated wind up in the coffers of lawmakers’, including the president’s, major donors. Both federal and state lawmakers have chosen to ignore or are too dumb to see the relationship between a working public health system and stemming the tide of COVID infections. Here’s a real head-scratcher. In at least fourteen states, public health budgets were cut as pandemic cases and deaths skyrocketed.  Michigan “temporarily” cut most of its state health workers’ hours by one-fifth. Pennsylvania forced 65 of its 1,200 public health workers to go on temporary leave and cut the jobs of others.

Not all Americans are suffering. The fortunate few, the one percenters, have a different kind of pain. Able to afford the most expensive healthcare in the world, sickness and death are not the source of their pain. It’s their bank accounts taking a hit as the real money makers like elective surgeries and non-COVID treatments in doctors’ offices grind to a halt.

Let’s take a brief trip down memory lane to see how U.S. healthcare ended up sideways

About thirty years ago the invasion of private equity began in earnest. Hospitals were their primary target. Their business model —“Health care is not so much anymore about taking care of patients. It’s way more about making money.” (Eileen Appelbaum, Center for Economic and Policy Research]. Many of the hospitals that held onto their non-profit status, quietly adopted the bad habits of their profit-making buddies.

Before the pandemic, healthcare was on the hit list of almost every private equity firm. Their opening act was a $41.5 billion investment in 2010. By 2019, they had scooped up $120 billion worth of healthcare assets. Over the last decade the total private investment in what has become the business of healthcare is three-quarters of a billion dollars.

When a private firm takes over a healthcare facility be it a hospital, emergency room, nursing home or physician practice, the formula never varies. First order of business —finance the purchase and pay fat bonuses to executives by loading up the new asset with debt.  To pay down that debt, the era of belt-tightening begins usually with draconian staff cuts.. Long before COVID, doctors, nurses and support staff often found themselves out of a job. The pandemic speeded up the thinning of the herd. What had been a slow and steady march of personnel shown the door suddenly became a mob scene. Eventually over one million healthcare workers got the boot —135,000 hospital workers.

But it wasn’t only staff that was in short supply as for-profit companies played the austerity card. Supplies of masks and other PPE and life-saving equipment like ventilators were also MIA. Long before the pandemic, hospitals stopped building inventories of supplies instead replacing items as they ran out.

The richest and most powerful country in the world forced sick and dying Americans to wait in ambulances for hours until a bed or even a spot on the floor of a hospital corridor opened up. Horrific photos of refrigerated trucks brought in to handle the overflow of dead people were broadcast for the whole world to see.

It wasn’t only healthcare workers and supplies and equipment that started disappearing. Hospital capacity was another casualty. Carrying excess beds in non-pandemic times bit into the golden goose that executives and investors were expecting. In 1971 the United States had 1.5 million hospital beds or one hospital bed per 138 Americans. By 2017, 931,000 beds remained while the population grew from 207 million to 327 million. Now there was only one bed for every 351 Americans. In the billionaire mentality, the possibility of a major health catastrophe requiring non-existent resources took a back seat to profits.

As the toll from the pandemic ballooned, it looked bad for the healthcare honchos who had gotten rich while the American people sickened and died. The fifteen billionaires who own the media sprang into action. Time to lay the blame squarely on COVID.

The wreckage that Americans laughingly call their healthcare system has become a bunch of private equity fiefdoms transforming 25% of hospitals, 50% of emergency room doctors, 47% of doctors’ practices and 70% of nursing homes into corporate ATMs. Long before COVID the quality of U.S. healthcare was the worst in the developed world while private equity investors were the richest in the world.  Even the pandemic has failed to staunch their avarice. In the first quarter of 2021, private equity-owned hospitals had higher markups for their services than other hospitals with correspondingly higher profit margins for their executives and investors.

How much longer can U.S. leaders remain passive when the evidence is clear — 300,000 of the people who died of COVID were uninsured. 10.9 million who got COVID were similarly uninsured. Is this the American version of equality? A society of “haves” and “have-nots” [George W. Bush] The next time someone says that COVID did it, remember it wouldn’t have happened if COVID didn’t have a lot of help from the wealthy crooks who control healthcare and their enablers America’s elected leaders.