Hospitals As Well?

Apparently private equity is starting to take over hospitals. As this article, 'Private Equity and Hospitals: Have They Finally Gone Too Far?', on Racket News says when talking about how people would have reacted in the old days -

I would hazard to guess that if some speculator came in who wanted to buy the hospital, leverage it up to the hilt, squeeze every last nickel out of it by skimping on supplies, cancel vital services and risk running it into the ground, well, that speculator would have been run out of town on a rail.

Private Equity! From an old lecture called 'Introduction to Private Equity'

Sounds about right to me. But, those days in the past when communities owned and controlled community resources are gone, and private equity is doing just what's described above as it gobbles up hospitals now. After all, gotta make money from health care, right? It's the 'Merican Way'!

Eggs and the Fight

Recently Matt Stoller's newsletter, Big, started a series of articles about the egg 'crisis' here in the USA and the entities behind it. It's a very good couple of articles, written by Basel Musharbash. The first article is entitled 'Hatching a Conspiracy: A BIG Investigation into Egg Prices'. The second article, 'Fowl Play: How Chicken Genetics Barons Created the Egg Crisis' goes into the two, yes only two, companies that control chicken genetics and the production of egg laying hens.

Image from Hatching a Conspiracy: A BIG Investigation into Egg Prices.

Read and Watch

Recent Reads:
Matt Stoller recently wrote an article for the Guardian called 'Corporations are forcing Americans to pay more for less – in their own words'. It's worth a read; it dives into the proof that's available that the high prices (a very recent example, utility prices going up) and bad economy many of us are feeling are real, despite all the good stuff like more jobs, etc.

I wasn't at all surprised to learn that big business groups are conspiring/plotting through price-fixing to make us pay more on things like gasoline, housing, utilities, meat/food, hotels and more. I wish more people in power would pay attention to this, but that's a pipe-dream, isn't it?

Stoller concludes:

There are also a number of concrete steps policymakers can take to respond to this price-fixing.

The first is to arrest or sue the offending executives for criminal activity.

The second is to strengthen price-fixing and merger laws, allow more private class-action suits, force judges to speed up cases and increase the budget of antitrust enforcers to make collusion more difficult.

The third is to reform the Federal Reserve so policymakers there stop using macro-economic models that avoid considerations of profits and price-fixing.

And the fourth is, frankly, political. One key reason there is action on these schemes is because Biden has prioritized antitrust enforcement. He hasn’t put enough into antitrust, and he doesn’t talk about it very often. But he should, or else Americans are likely to fall into the trap of thinking that what is good for big business is good for their pocketbooks, when the opposite is so often the case.

A Realization:
Sometimes, something hits me just right, and makes me expand my opinion, thoughts, formulations of a subject. That happened to me recently.