All hail the healthcare industry taking its place alongside big oil, big tech, slimy defense contractors and big banks as the oligarchic masters of the U.S. empire. If you thought America was the world’s greatest democracy, a revelation awaits. If, in fact, America was ever a democracy (the jury is still out), all traces of it went out with girdles and phone booths. If you still cling to your high school fantasies of living in the greatest democracy the world has ever produced, get a load of this —“Functioning democracy means that there’s a correlation between the will of the people and the policies that affect them… [The US] may call itself democratic, but in essence, it’s an oligarchy.” With oligarchy comes income inequality — tons of it. America now leads the advanced economies that make up the G7 in the inequality sweeps. You know where you’ll find lots of it? In healthcare where one hundred million people struggle with medical debt, 41% of all American adults. While the suffering among the people intensifies, there’s good news for healthcare oligarchs —the CEOs of 178 health care companies collectively made $3.2 billion in 2020, 31% more than in 2019. During the same period, millions of people were suffering and dying from COVID. You need a strong stomach to handle this —in 2020, the ratio of CEO-to-typical-worker compensation was a stunning 351-to-1. There’s more, much more about how economic inequality is deepening the class divide between the haves and the have-nots. Check out “Plague on Your House” for all the nauseating details.
