Greed Is Immoral. Health Care Greed Is Abominable
America has endured a long panorama of corporate greed -- from the East India Trading Company to the Robber Barons, Gordon Gecko Wall Streeters to Elon Musk. But down at the bottom of raw greediness today, you'll find the insatiable profiteers of the private nursing home industry.
Of course, many providers deliver honest, truly caring service (especially nonprofit and publicly owned community centers). But as a whole, this essential service has fallen into the clutches of money-hustling corporate chains and Wall Street speculators. Their goal is not to maximize grandma's care but to minimalize her cost to faraway rich shareholders.
Their most common profiteering ploy is to understaff their facilities, leaving vulnerable residents unattended ... and often, dead. Federal law, though, lets corporate owners define "sufficient" staff levels, which is why so many are grossly insufficient. One profit-padding tactic is called "tunneling" -- the chain sets up a dummy staffing agency to provide employees for the chain's nursing homes. That agency then charges greatly inflated to provide employees. But the chain doesn't complain, since it owns the agency ... and since unknowing customers end up paying the jacked-up tab.
President Joe Biden has proposed new rules to stop the gouging and improve care, including a requirement that each "nursing" home actually keep at least one nurse on staff. One! But, oh, the squeals by billionaire owners! "Cost prohibitive," they howl! So, instead of hiring nurses, they're hiring high-dollar lobbyists and lawyers to kill this little bit of health care fairness for people who are near the end of life.
These multimillionaire executives and billionaire investors are not only gouging families but profiteering on the health of people's loved ones. In case they care, that is why the public despises them.
WHY SHOULD WE ALLOW FOOD MONOPOLIES? LET'S BUST THE SYSTEM!
How are monopolistic corporations able to gain their economic dominance? By getting politicians to give it to them.
Consider the old robber barons. They weren't brilliant investors or managers but ruthless exploiters of government giveaways and bribers of officials who permitted their monopolistic thievery.
Likewise, today's monopoly players have captured local, state and national markets -- not through honest competition but by getting public officials to subsidize their expansion and to rig the rules against small competitors. Monopolizers buy this favoritism with the legalized bribes of campaign donations they lavish on compliant lawmakers.
Investigative digger Stacy Mitchell recently documented how this corrupt political favoritism has allowed massive retail chains like Walmart, Kroger and Dollar Tree to crush thousands of local grocers. This has left millions of Americans living in "food deserts" -- poor and rural communities with no food store.
What happened? As grocery chains spread from local to regional to national, they demanded that food manufacturers give them big discounts, giving them a dramatic monopoly pricing advantage over independent rivals. So, hometown grocers began hemorrhaging customers ... and going broke.
This raw, anti-competitive price discrimination was a flagrant violation of America's anti-monopoly law -- but here came Big Money to protect the monopolists. In 1980, as President Ronald Reagan was railing against "silly" consumer protection laws, supermarket lobbyists poured campaign cash into top officials of both parties. What they bought was bipartisan agreement to simply stop enforcing the "fusty" old antitrust law that had protected a competitive grocery economy for nearly 50 years.
But good news! That useful, highly effective law is still on the books, so let's build a long-term grassroots campaign to rejuvenate it and re-outlaw monopolization, redlining and price gouging by food giants. For more information, go to Institute for Local Self Reliance: ilsr.org.
To find out more about Jim Hightower and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators webpage at www.creators.com.
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