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A reveler roller skates with a sign reading, “Scream If Your Rent Is Too Damn High” at the 2022 Halloween Parade on October 31, 2022, in New York City.
The rich are busy turning the 20th-century dream of owning your own home into the grubby 21st-century reality of renting your own home forever.
Democracy or plutocracy? Which label better fits today’s US of A? An apt question to contemplate as we enter what could turn out to be our most harrowing political year since Abe Lincoln’s election. Where to begin this contemplation? How about we take a stab at some definitions.
In a democracy, people identify the problems they face and, working together, try to fashion solutions. In a plutocracy, by contrast, a society’s richest employ their power to exploit the most pressing problems their nation faces — and keep real solutions off the table.
Where do these definitions leave the 21st-century United States? In deep plutocratic doo. Consider, for instance, how we’re responding, as a nation, to our contemporary housing crisis.
For younger American families, the classic American dream — a home of your own! — has become an ongoing nightmare. Some 20 percent of young American men between 25 and 34 lived with their parents last year, 12 percent of young women. America’s multigenerational household population, the Pew Research center notes, has quadrupled since the early 1970s.
What explains these stats? The simple story: Fewer and fewer American young people can afford a home of their own. Overall, an Amherst Group analysis has found, some 85 percent of renting households cannot “qualify for a mortgage.” America’s most typical first-time homebuyers last year, adds the National Association of Realtors, had already turned 36 years old. Young people a generation ago were becoming first-time homebuyers in their 20s.
The economic reality behind all these stats: the shrinking share of America’s wealth that belongs to average Americans. Back in the mid-1990s, America’s “middle class” — the middle 60 percent of U.S. households by income — held double the wealth of the nation’s richest 1 percent. Last year, Fed Reserve researchers calculate, top 1 percenters held more wealth than our entire middle 60 percent.
And America’s richest aren’t just enjoying that turnaround. They’re exploiting it — on a wide variety of housing-related fronts.
In Our Unequal World...
Some rich are busy turning the 20th-century dream of owning your own home into the grubby 21st-century reality of renting your own home forever. These rich and the corporations they run have spent recent years buying up homes for sale and turning their new purchases into rental properties.
In big cities ranging from Atlanta to Phoenix, deep-pocket investors have accounted for between a quarter and a third of local home purchases. The impact of this deep-pocket dabbling in the sale of middle-class housing? Corporate landlords turn out to be more likely, a Vox analysis points out, to evict tenants, raise rents, and dodge needed repairs and maintenance.
Apologist for the richest among us are claiming that critics of this deep-pocket interest in middle-class housing are making a mountain out of an investment molehill. They point out, for instance, that private-equity firms and other “institutional investors” drove less than 3 percent of all home sales in 2021 and 2022.
But that low national percentage, note housing experts like Cincinnati’s Laura Brunner, can obscure what’s happening in many actual local neighborhoods. Private-equity dollars can routinely buy up “50 percent of the houses on a single street.”
Other deep-pocketed movers and shakers, meanwhile, are taking different routes to exploiting America’s inadequate supply of affordable housing. Just how inadequate? In the decade that ended in 2022, Realtor.com reported last March, the nation ended up with “a shortfall of 6.5 million single-family homes.” The investor response to that shortfall? An explosion of “residential transition loans.”
These loans go to America’s growing army of house “flippers,” local speculators of various sorts who buy up older homes from families that can’t afford to make badly needed upgrades and repairs. The loans come at a “relatively high interest rate,” as much as 10 percent annually, notes Barron’s.
Financial industry outfits like 1Sharpe Capital, a subsidiary of the Blackstone private-equity colossus, package these high-interest notes into investment funds that offer millionaires returns that can average over three percentage points more than investments in U.S. Treasury funds.
The sharpies at 1Sharpe Capital, for their role in all this, reap an annual management fee of 0.5 percent and a 20-percent “performance fee” if they deliver investment fund returns that run 1.3 percent or more above the three-month Treasury index.
These ample fees ultimately make up only a tiny share of the income that annually pours into the Blackstone private-equity pool. But every little bit helps. Blackstone CEO Stephen Schwarzman, we learned this past August, “received a total adjusted compensation package of $253.1 million in 2022.”
Rewards that outrageous have begun capturing some serious attention from progressive lawmakers in Congress. A year ago this past fall, Rep. Ro Khana from California introduced the Stop Wall Street Landlords Act of 2022, legislation that would, among other provisions, prohibit “large investors from obtaining certain federal mortgage assistance” and create a tax credit that affordable housing developers could tap to build and rehab homes in low-income communities.
Two lawmakers from the Pacific Northwest, Senator Jeff Merkley from Oregon and Rep. Adam Smith from Washington, have recently upped the reform ante. The End Hedge Fund Control of American Homes Act they introduced this past December would, if enacted, ban hedge and private-equity funds from buying up single-family homes and force them to sell off — over the next decade — the homes they already own.
Still another new bill now before Congress, the American Neighborhoods Protection Act proposed by North Carolina lawmakers Jeff Jackson and Alma Adams, would require corporate owners of over 75 single-family homes to pay $10,000 per home annually into a housing trust fund individual families could tap for help on housing downpayments.
None of these pending reforms have any shot at making it through the current Congress, not given America’s current plutocratic realities. America’s richest don’t just have the wherewithal to exploit the real needs of average American families. Their wealth distorts our national political dialogue. Their political power dooms and delays real solutions to the problems average people face.
How can we advance those real solutions? We need to think big. We need to start redistributing the fabulous amounts of wealth that have concentrated at America’s economic summit. Without that redistribution, our wealthiest will continue to exploit our society’s most aggravating unmet needs.
Take, for instance, the wheeling and dealing of one of the latest billionaire entrants into the buy-up-America’s-housing-stock sweepstakes, Jeff Bezos. The investment fund start-up Bezos is backing, Vice reported last month, “is betting on single-family home rentals because fewer people can afford to buy homes and more people are stuck renting.”
California congressman Ro Khana’s reaction?
“The last thing Americans need is a Bezos-backed investment company further consolidating single-family homes and putting homeownership out of reach for more and more people,” Khana noted last month. “Housing should be a right, not a speculative commodity.”
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Democracy or plutocracy? Which label better fits today’s US of A? An apt question to contemplate as we enter what could turn out to be our most harrowing political year since Abe Lincoln’s election. Where to begin this contemplation? How about we take a stab at some definitions.
In a democracy, people identify the problems they face and, working together, try to fashion solutions. In a plutocracy, by contrast, a society’s richest employ their power to exploit the most pressing problems their nation faces — and keep real solutions off the table.
Where do these definitions leave the 21st-century United States? In deep plutocratic doo. Consider, for instance, how we’re responding, as a nation, to our contemporary housing crisis.
For younger American families, the classic American dream — a home of your own! — has become an ongoing nightmare. Some 20 percent of young American men between 25 and 34 lived with their parents last year, 12 percent of young women. America’s multigenerational household population, the Pew Research center notes, has quadrupled since the early 1970s.
What explains these stats? The simple story: Fewer and fewer American young people can afford a home of their own. Overall, an Amherst Group analysis has found, some 85 percent of renting households cannot “qualify for a mortgage.” America’s most typical first-time homebuyers last year, adds the National Association of Realtors, had already turned 36 years old. Young people a generation ago were becoming first-time homebuyers in their 20s.
The economic reality behind all these stats: the shrinking share of America’s wealth that belongs to average Americans. Back in the mid-1990s, America’s “middle class” — the middle 60 percent of U.S. households by income — held double the wealth of the nation’s richest 1 percent. Last year, Fed Reserve researchers calculate, top 1 percenters held more wealth than our entire middle 60 percent.
And America’s richest aren’t just enjoying that turnaround. They’re exploiting it — on a wide variety of housing-related fronts.
In Our Unequal World...
Some rich are busy turning the 20th-century dream of owning your own home into the grubby 21st-century reality of renting your own home forever. These rich and the corporations they run have spent recent years buying up homes for sale and turning their new purchases into rental properties.
In big cities ranging from Atlanta to Phoenix, deep-pocket investors have accounted for between a quarter and a third of local home purchases. The impact of this deep-pocket dabbling in the sale of middle-class housing? Corporate landlords turn out to be more likely, a Vox analysis points out, to evict tenants, raise rents, and dodge needed repairs and maintenance.
Apologist for the richest among us are claiming that critics of this deep-pocket interest in middle-class housing are making a mountain out of an investment molehill. They point out, for instance, that private-equity firms and other “institutional investors” drove less than 3 percent of all home sales in 2021 and 2022.
But that low national percentage, note housing experts like Cincinnati’s Laura Brunner, can obscure what’s happening in many actual local neighborhoods. Private-equity dollars can routinely buy up “50 percent of the houses on a single street.”
Other deep-pocketed movers and shakers, meanwhile, are taking different routes to exploiting America’s inadequate supply of affordable housing. Just how inadequate? In the decade that ended in 2022, Realtor.com reported last March, the nation ended up with “a shortfall of 6.5 million single-family homes.” The investor response to that shortfall? An explosion of “residential transition loans.”
These loans go to America’s growing army of house “flippers,” local speculators of various sorts who buy up older homes from families that can’t afford to make badly needed upgrades and repairs. The loans come at a “relatively high interest rate,” as much as 10 percent annually, notes Barron’s.
Financial industry outfits like 1Sharpe Capital, a subsidiary of the Blackstone private-equity colossus, package these high-interest notes into investment funds that offer millionaires returns that can average over three percentage points more than investments in U.S. Treasury funds.
The sharpies at 1Sharpe Capital, for their role in all this, reap an annual management fee of 0.5 percent and a 20-percent “performance fee” if they deliver investment fund returns that run 1.3 percent or more above the three-month Treasury index.
These ample fees ultimately make up only a tiny share of the income that annually pours into the Blackstone private-equity pool. But every little bit helps. Blackstone CEO Stephen Schwarzman, we learned this past August, “received a total adjusted compensation package of $253.1 million in 2022.”
Rewards that outrageous have begun capturing some serious attention from progressive lawmakers in Congress. A year ago this past fall, Rep. Ro Khana from California introduced the Stop Wall Street Landlords Act of 2022, legislation that would, among other provisions, prohibit “large investors from obtaining certain federal mortgage assistance” and create a tax credit that affordable housing developers could tap to build and rehab homes in low-income communities.
Two lawmakers from the Pacific Northwest, Senator Jeff Merkley from Oregon and Rep. Adam Smith from Washington, have recently upped the reform ante. The End Hedge Fund Control of American Homes Act they introduced this past December would, if enacted, ban hedge and private-equity funds from buying up single-family homes and force them to sell off — over the next decade — the homes they already own.
Still another new bill now before Congress, the American Neighborhoods Protection Act proposed by North Carolina lawmakers Jeff Jackson and Alma Adams, would require corporate owners of over 75 single-family homes to pay $10,000 per home annually into a housing trust fund individual families could tap for help on housing downpayments.
None of these pending reforms have any shot at making it through the current Congress, not given America’s current plutocratic realities. America’s richest don’t just have the wherewithal to exploit the real needs of average American families. Their wealth distorts our national political dialogue. Their political power dooms and delays real solutions to the problems average people face.
How can we advance those real solutions? We need to think big. We need to start redistributing the fabulous amounts of wealth that have concentrated at America’s economic summit. Without that redistribution, our wealthiest will continue to exploit our society’s most aggravating unmet needs.
Take, for instance, the wheeling and dealing of one of the latest billionaire entrants into the buy-up-America’s-housing-stock sweepstakes, Jeff Bezos. The investment fund start-up Bezos is backing, Vice reported last month, “is betting on single-family home rentals because fewer people can afford to buy homes and more people are stuck renting.”
California congressman Ro Khana’s reaction?
“The last thing Americans need is a Bezos-backed investment company further consolidating single-family homes and putting homeownership out of reach for more and more people,” Khana noted last month. “Housing should be a right, not a speculative commodity.”
Democracy or plutocracy? Which label better fits today’s US of A? An apt question to contemplate as we enter what could turn out to be our most harrowing political year since Abe Lincoln’s election. Where to begin this contemplation? How about we take a stab at some definitions.
In a democracy, people identify the problems they face and, working together, try to fashion solutions. In a plutocracy, by contrast, a society’s richest employ their power to exploit the most pressing problems their nation faces — and keep real solutions off the table.
Where do these definitions leave the 21st-century United States? In deep plutocratic doo. Consider, for instance, how we’re responding, as a nation, to our contemporary housing crisis.
For younger American families, the classic American dream — a home of your own! — has become an ongoing nightmare. Some 20 percent of young American men between 25 and 34 lived with their parents last year, 12 percent of young women. America’s multigenerational household population, the Pew Research center notes, has quadrupled since the early 1970s.
What explains these stats? The simple story: Fewer and fewer American young people can afford a home of their own. Overall, an Amherst Group analysis has found, some 85 percent of renting households cannot “qualify for a mortgage.” America’s most typical first-time homebuyers last year, adds the National Association of Realtors, had already turned 36 years old. Young people a generation ago were becoming first-time homebuyers in their 20s.
The economic reality behind all these stats: the shrinking share of America’s wealth that belongs to average Americans. Back in the mid-1990s, America’s “middle class” — the middle 60 percent of U.S. households by income — held double the wealth of the nation’s richest 1 percent. Last year, Fed Reserve researchers calculate, top 1 percenters held more wealth than our entire middle 60 percent.
And America’s richest aren’t just enjoying that turnaround. They’re exploiting it — on a wide variety of housing-related fronts.
In Our Unequal World...
Some rich are busy turning the 20th-century dream of owning your own home into the grubby 21st-century reality of renting your own home forever. These rich and the corporations they run have spent recent years buying up homes for sale and turning their new purchases into rental properties.
In big cities ranging from Atlanta to Phoenix, deep-pocket investors have accounted for between a quarter and a third of local home purchases. The impact of this deep-pocket dabbling in the sale of middle-class housing? Corporate landlords turn out to be more likely, a Vox analysis points out, to evict tenants, raise rents, and dodge needed repairs and maintenance.
Apologist for the richest among us are claiming that critics of this deep-pocket interest in middle-class housing are making a mountain out of an investment molehill. They point out, for instance, that private-equity firms and other “institutional investors” drove less than 3 percent of all home sales in 2021 and 2022.
But that low national percentage, note housing experts like Cincinnati’s Laura Brunner, can obscure what’s happening in many actual local neighborhoods. Private-equity dollars can routinely buy up “50 percent of the houses on a single street.”
Other deep-pocketed movers and shakers, meanwhile, are taking different routes to exploiting America’s inadequate supply of affordable housing. Just how inadequate? In the decade that ended in 2022, Realtor.com reported last March, the nation ended up with “a shortfall of 6.5 million single-family homes.” The investor response to that shortfall? An explosion of “residential transition loans.”
These loans go to America’s growing army of house “flippers,” local speculators of various sorts who buy up older homes from families that can’t afford to make badly needed upgrades and repairs. The loans come at a “relatively high interest rate,” as much as 10 percent annually, notes Barron’s.
Financial industry outfits like 1Sharpe Capital, a subsidiary of the Blackstone private-equity colossus, package these high-interest notes into investment funds that offer millionaires returns that can average over three percentage points more than investments in U.S. Treasury funds.
The sharpies at 1Sharpe Capital, for their role in all this, reap an annual management fee of 0.5 percent and a 20-percent “performance fee” if they deliver investment fund returns that run 1.3 percent or more above the three-month Treasury index.
These ample fees ultimately make up only a tiny share of the income that annually pours into the Blackstone private-equity pool. But every little bit helps. Blackstone CEO Stephen Schwarzman, we learned this past August, “received a total adjusted compensation package of $253.1 million in 2022.”
Rewards that outrageous have begun capturing some serious attention from progressive lawmakers in Congress. A year ago this past fall, Rep. Ro Khana from California introduced the Stop Wall Street Landlords Act of 2022, legislation that would, among other provisions, prohibit “large investors from obtaining certain federal mortgage assistance” and create a tax credit that affordable housing developers could tap to build and rehab homes in low-income communities.
Two lawmakers from the Pacific Northwest, Senator Jeff Merkley from Oregon and Rep. Adam Smith from Washington, have recently upped the reform ante. The End Hedge Fund Control of American Homes Act they introduced this past December would, if enacted, ban hedge and private-equity funds from buying up single-family homes and force them to sell off — over the next decade — the homes they already own.
Still another new bill now before Congress, the American Neighborhoods Protection Act proposed by North Carolina lawmakers Jeff Jackson and Alma Adams, would require corporate owners of over 75 single-family homes to pay $10,000 per home annually into a housing trust fund individual families could tap for help on housing downpayments.
None of these pending reforms have any shot at making it through the current Congress, not given America’s current plutocratic realities. America’s richest don’t just have the wherewithal to exploit the real needs of average American families. Their wealth distorts our national political dialogue. Their political power dooms and delays real solutions to the problems average people face.
How can we advance those real solutions? We need to think big. We need to start redistributing the fabulous amounts of wealth that have concentrated at America’s economic summit. Without that redistribution, our wealthiest will continue to exploit our society’s most aggravating unmet needs.
Take, for instance, the wheeling and dealing of one of the latest billionaire entrants into the buy-up-America’s-housing-stock sweepstakes, Jeff Bezos. The investment fund start-up Bezos is backing, Vice reported last month, “is betting on single-family home rentals because fewer people can afford to buy homes and more people are stuck renting.”
California congressman Ro Khana’s reaction?
“The last thing Americans need is a Bezos-backed investment company further consolidating single-family homes and putting homeownership out of reach for more and more people,” Khana noted last month. “Housing should be a right, not a speculative commodity.”
"They're now using the failed War on Drugs to justify their egregious violation of international law," the Minnesota progressive said of the Trump administration.
Congresswomen Ilhan Omar and Delia Ramirez on Thursday strongly condemned the Trump administration's deadly attack on a boat allegedly trafficking cocaine off the coast of Venezuela as "lawless and reckless," while urging the White House to respect lawmakers' "clear constitutional authority on matters of war and peace."
"Congress has not declared war on Venezuela, or Tren de Aragua, and the mere designation of a group as a terrorist organization does not give any president carte blanche," said Omar (D-Minn.), referring to President Donald Trump's day one executive order designating drug cartels including the Venezuela-based group as foreign terrorist organizations.
Trump—who reportedly signed a secret order directing the Pentagon to use military force to combat cartels abroad—said that Tuesday's US strike in international waters killed 11 people. The attack sparked fears of renewed US aggression in a region that has endured well over 100 US interventions over the past 200 years, and against a country that has suffered US meddling since the late 19th century.
"It appears that US forces that were recently sent to the region in an escalatory and provocative manner were under no threat from the boat they attacked," Omar cotended. "There is no conceivable legal justification for this use of force. Unless compelling evidence emerges that they were acting in self-defense, that makes the strike a clear violation of international law."
Omar continued:
They're now using the failed War on Drugs to justify their egregious violation of international law. The US posture towards the eradication of drugs has caused immeasurable damage across our hemisphere. It has led to massive forced displacement, environmental devastation, violence, and human rights violations. What it has not done is any damage whatsoever to narcotrafficking or to the cartels. It has been a dramatic, profound failure at every level. In Latin America, even right-wing presidents acknowledge this is true.
The congresswoman's remarks came on the same day that US Secretary of State Marco Rubio designated a pair of Ecuadorean drug gangs as terrorist organizations while visiting the South American nation. This, after Rubio said that US attacks on suspected drug traffickers "will happen again."
"Trump and Rubio's apparent solution" to the failed drug war, said Omar, is "to make it even more militarized," an effort that "is doomed to fail."
"Worse, it risks spiraling into the exact type of endless, pointless conflict that Trump supposedly opposes," she added.
Echoing critics including former Human Rights Watch director Kenneth Roth, who called Tuesday's strike a "summary execution," Ramirez (D-Ill.) said Thursday on social media that "Trump and the Pentagon executed 11 people in the Caribbean, 1,500 miles away from the United States, without a legal rationale."
"From Iran to Venezuela, to DC, LA, and Chicago, Trump continues to abuse our military power, undermine the rule of law, and erode our constitutional boundaries in political spectacles," Ramirez added, referring to the president's ordering of strikes on Iran and National Guard deployments to Los Angeles, the nation's capital, and likely beyond.
"Presidents don't bomb first and ask questions later," Ramirez added. "Wannabe dictators do that."
"The fact that a facility embedded in so much pain is allowed to reopen is absolutely disheartening!" said Florida Immigrant Coalition's deputy director.
Two judges appointed to the US Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit by President Donald Trump issued a Thursday decision that allows a newly established but already notorious immigrant detention center in Florida, dubbed Alligator Alcatraz, to stay open.
Friends of the Everglades, the Center for Biological Diversity, and the Miccosukee Tribe of Indians of Florida sought "to halt the unlawful construction" of the site. Last month, Judge Kathleen Williams—appointed by former President Barack Obama to the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida—ordered the closure of the facility within 60 days.
However, on Thursday, Circuit Judges Elizabeth Branch and Barbara Lagoa blocked Williams' decision, concluding that "the balance of the harms and our consideration of the public interest favor a stay of the preliminary injunction."
Judge Adalberto Jordan, an Obama appointee, issued a brief but scathing dissent. He wrote that the majority "essentially ignores the burden borne by the defendants, pays only lip service to the abuse of discretion standard, engages in its own factfinding, declines to consider the district court's determination on irreparable harm, and performs its own balancing of the equities."
The 11th Circuit's ruling was cheered by the US Department of Homeland Security, Republican Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier, and Gov. Ron DeSantis, who declared in a video that "Alligator Alcatraz is, in fact, like we've always said, open for business."
Uthmeier's communications director, Jeremy Redfern, collected responses to the initial ruling by state and federal Democrats, and urged them to weigh in on social media. Florida state Sen. Shevrin "Shev" Jones (D-34) did, stressing that "cruelty is still cruelty."
In a Thursday statement, Florida Immigrant Coalition deputy director Renata Bozzetto said that "the 11th Circuit is allowing atrocities to happen by reversing the injunction that helped to paralyze something that has been functioning as an extrajudicial site in our own state! The Everglades Detention Camp isn't just an environmental threat; it is also a huge human rights crisis."
"Housing thousands of men in tents in the middle of a fragile ecosystem puts immense strain on Florida's source environment, but even more troublesome, it disregards human rights and our constitutional commitments," Bozzetto continued. "This is a place where hundreds of our neighbors were illegally held, were made invisible within government systems, and were subjected to inhumane heat and unbearable treatment. The fact that a facility embedded in so much pain is allowed to reopen is absolutely disheartening! The only just solution is to shut this facility down and ensure that no facility like this opens in our state!"
"Lastly, it is imperative that we as a nation uphold the balance of powers that this country was founded on," she added. "That is what makes this country special! Calling judges who rule against you 'activists' flies in the face of our democracy. It is a huge tell that AG Uthmeier expressed this as a 'win for President Trump's agenda,' as if the courts were to serve as political weapons. This demonstrates the clear partisan games they are playing with people's lives and with our democracy."
While Alligator Alcatraz has drawn widespread criticism for the conditions in which detainees are held, the suit is based on the government's failure to follow a law that requires an environmental review, given the facility's proximity to surrounding wetlands.
In response to the ruling, Elise Bennett, a senior attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity, told The Associated Press that "this is a heartbreaking blow to America's Everglades and every living creature there, but the case isn't even close to over."
The report found that seven of America's biggest healthcare companies have collectively dodged $34 billion in taxes as a result of Trump's 2017 tax law while making patient care worse.
President Donald Trump's tax policies have allowed the healthcare industry to rake in "sick profits" by avoiding tens of billions of dollars in taxes and lowering the quality of care for patients, according to a report out Wednesday.
The report, by the advocacy groups Americans for Tax Fairness and Community Catalyst, found that "seven of America's biggest healthcare corporations have dodged over $34 billion in collective taxes since the enactment of the 2017 Trump-GOP tax law that Republicans recently succeeded in extending."
The study examined four health insurance companies—Centene, Cigna, Elevance (formerly Anthem), and Humana; two for-profit hospital chains—HCA Holdings and Universal Health Services; and the CVS Healthcare pharmacy conglomerate.
It found that these companies' average profits increased by 75%, from around $21 billion before the tax bill to about $35 billion afterward, and yet their federal tax rate was about the same.
This was primarily due to the 2017 law's slashing of the corporate tax rate from 35% to 21%, a change that was cheered on by the healthcare industry and continued with this year's GOP tax legislation. The legislation also loosened many tax loopholes and made it easier to move profits to offshore tax shelters.
The report found that Cigna, for instance, saved an estimated $181 million in taxes on the $2.5 billion it held in offshore accounts before the law took effect.
The law's supporters, including those in the healthcare industry, argued that lowering corporate taxes would allow companies to increase wages and provide better services to patients. But the report found that "healthcare corporations failed to use their tax savings to lower costs for customers or meaningfully boost worker pay."
Instead, they used those windfalls primarily to increase shareholder payouts through stock buybacks and dividends and to give fat bonuses to their top executives.
Stock buybacks increased by 42% after the law passed, with Centene purchasing an astonishing average of 20 times more of its own shares in the years following its enactment than in the years before. During the first seven years of the law, dividends for shareholders increased by 133% to an average of $5.6 billion.
Pay for the seven companies' half-dozen top executives increased by a combined $100 million, 42%, on average. This is compared to the $14,000 pay increase that the average employee at these companies received over the same period, which is a much more modest increase of 24%.
And contrary to claims that lower taxes would allow companies to improve coverage or patient care, the opposite has occurred.
While data is scarce, the rate of denied insurance claims is believed to have risen since the law went into effect.
The four major insurers' Medicare Advantage plans were found to frequently deny claims improperly. In the case of Centene, 93% of its denials for prior authorizations were overturned once patients appealed them, which indicates that they may have been improper. The others were not much better: 86% of Cigna's denials were overturned, along with 71% for Elevance/Anthem, and 65% for Humana.
The report said that such high rates of denials being overturned raise "questions about whether Medicare Advantage plans are complying with their coverage obligations or just reflexively saying 'no' in the hopes there will be no appeal."
Salespeople for the Cigna-owned company EviCore, which insurers hire to review claims, have even boasted that they help companies reduce their costs by increasing denials by 15%, part of a model that ProPublica has called the "denials for dollars business." Their investigation in 2024 found that insurers have used EviCore to evaluate whether to pay for coverage for over 100 million people.
And while paying tens of millions to their executives, both HCA and Universal Health Services—which each saved around $5.5 billion from Trump's tax law—have been repeatedly accused of overbilling patients while treating them in horrendous conditions.
"Congress should demand both more in tax revenue and better patient care from these highly profitable corporations," Americans for Tax Fairness said in a statement. "Healthcare corporation profitability should not come before quality of patient care. In healthcare, more than almost any other industry, the search for ever higher earnings threatens the wellbeing and lives of the American people."