In community after community, the hospitals keep closing. In 2018, it was Northside Regional Medical Center in Youngstown, Ohio.
In 2019, it was Ohio Valley Medical Center in Wheeling, West Virginia, along with East Ohio Regional Hospital across the river in Martins Ferry, Ohio. That November, St. Luke’s Medical Center, which had treated patients in Phoenix for more than a century, shut its doors.
In 2020, as the pandemic hit, it was one in Massachusetts and another in West Virginia. Followed by four more — in California, Pennsylvania, and Texas — over the next three years.
Other hospitals are teetering on the brink. In 2022, Conemaugh Nason Medical Center in Pennsylvania announced it was ending OB-GYN deliveries, leaving some mothers-to-be to travel almost an hour to give birth. Last year, Glenwood Regional Medical Center in Louisiana was ordered by the state to turn away patients because of inadequate supplies and staffing levels.
I don’t think there’s a single problem we’re facing today that hasn’t been made meaningfully worse if not outright caused by private equity.
Healthcare doesn’t work as a for profit business model. High profits and high patient outcomes don’t align. Profit will always win at for profits and people will suffer
I know it seems like a fantasy now, but back before regulatory capture, Ronald Reagan and the outsourcing of whatever remained of state healthcare, the rise in HMOs and politicians that openly decided to work for Putin and fight culture wars instead of legislate, back when Clearance Thomas was just a groping lawyer and million dollar motorhomes were still a twinkle in his eye, THIS IS WHAT GOVERNMENT REGULARLY WORKED TO NOT ONLY STOP, BUT PREVENT.
If you read carefully, you can spot multiple state and federal organizations whose primary job it would have been to interfere in this at multiple steps of the process – SEC, FDA, DOJ – and even some secondary ones like the IRS.
Did they? No. Our government’s ENTIRE regulatory system has been captured and defanged. The Senate can get a dress policy enacted in a week because they don’t care for the length of Senator Fetterman’s shirts, and the House is led by a guy so weak he has to get his own teenage son to monitor his porn intake, but none of them can lift a fucking finger to do their jobs in any other respect because it too has been captured, many of them working openly for the best interests of Vladimir Putin, and the honorable ones who do care – Sanders, AOC, Warren, and the like – are simply outnumbered.
We have the right constitution. We have the right system. We have the resources as a nation to corral vultures like this, to stop this in its tracks. We did it for most of the 20th century. It’s not that there were no failures, it’s that there were ongoing collaborative successes in enough number to minimize what did get through the various safety nets. We had those too, once upon a time. Good ones, too.
What we do NOT have, and have not had for decades now, are people in office who will hold the line against corruption.
THIS is corruption on every level of government. And there’s more to come.
