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corporate greed
Let's Get Real: US Healthcare Is an Industry, Not a System
Insurance and hospital corporations embrace higher profits over patient safety.
Dec 05, 2025
This is your nurse. We called him Doug.
a camera monitor is used in patient rooms on August 2025 at HCA/Healthcare. (Photo by Donna Smith)
Some days we didn’t see a nurse for entire shifts—and only for medication delivery and scanning the bar codes for payment. This is also your patient technician. Oh, wait, techs are in short supply, and the robot camera doesn’t do hands-on patient care. This camera isn't even your fall-risk protection. The camera watches as you fall to record your missteps and guard against liability.
And with the help of every hospital administrator and every one of its complicit employees who have given themselves over to its inhumanity, the medical-financial-industrial complex (MFIC) has evolved to put patients in their places. It is an industry driving nearly one-fifth of the country’s economy—it is not a system.
Patients are widgets, at best, deserving of protection only to the extent that our profitability remains intact. Once the costs of delivering care exceed the revenue generated by our health insurance coverage or bank balances, the MFIC finds ways to turn that equation back to solid gold. The profits are dear. Your health is not the goal. That’s an industry, not a system.
We have an industry that uses patients as widgets and counts profits as the only desired measure of success.
Calling the US healthcare mess a system is the softening of economic terminology that drives the health industry ever forward to higher profit margins. Patients receiving care are medical losses to the insurance side of the house, while those same patients are revenue line items for hospitals and clinics. Our lives are not being protected, and our personal resources are often drained. Industry and greed do that, not health systems designed to heal and serve.
This year is on track to bring record profits to hospitals in Denver like the one in which my husband was trying to heal from complications of hip replacement surgery. Denver area hospitals did great this year and last, even if they try to dance around the facts behind their business successes, and corporate public relations staff work hard to keep the public out of that loop.
Look at the newspaper’s description of the profits. Do you see or hear the measures of how many patients were made healthier by their care? Nope. The measures are almost all business and economics—this is an industry, not a system.
Denver hospitals, in 2024, per the Denver Post:
- AdventHealth: $68.6 million loss, -4.5% margin
- CommonSpirit Health: $222.2 million profit, 9.2% margin (Kaiser patients must now use this hospital too)
- Denver Health: $52.9 million loss, -4.1% margin
- HCA HealthOne: $616.8 million profit, 21.3% margin (my hubby helped boost this number for 2025)
- Intermountain Health: $138.3 million loss, -6.5% margin
- UCHealth: $1.2 billion profit, 17.9% margin (nonprofit, for sure, eh?)
If you choose any city in the country, the consolidation of business interests in healthcare is rapidly making the measure of success one of profits built on the backs of the patients-widgets, their home caregivers who are used in hospital settings as unpaid staff, and taxpayers giving tax breaks to large hospitals corporations to build and expand their services to more paying customers—patients-widgets.
For many years, I have advocated for an expanded and improved Medicare for All coverage plan for all of us. We all pay in already, yet we still pay huge insurance premiums to health insurance companies that simply process paper. Why are we doing that? The coverage we all already pay for in payroll and other taxes is not a welfare plan or socialized medicine. I dare say we’d all be healthier if it were. Medicare as it stands covers our elderly and many disabled people through taxes.
If we improved that and expanded Medicare, private premiums would go away and we could all choose whoever and wherever we wanted to seek care. No government hospitals or doctors to screen care—that’s a lie the profit engine needs to push out. I am 100% in favor of getting the profit motive out of hospital care as much as possible. Greed knows no limits, and greed does not belong as a measure of our health.
This health industry is a largely unregulated mess. You know it, and I know it. It’s time to speak the truth about it—the United States does not have a health system. We have an industry that uses patients as widgets and counts profits as the only desired measure of success. Making money is a fine thing so long as it doesn’t mean lying about how we do it. We fuel our economy on suffering and illness, and without the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act-ACA-Obamacare subsidies, the health industry will be even more attentive to their bottom line. You ready?
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When the AI Bubble Bursts, Working Families Will Pay the Price
When the housing bubble burst, approximately 10 million Americans lost their homes. What will we lose this time?
Nov 25, 2025
When the AI bubble pops, who’s going to be left holding the bag? Mainstream economists, tech oligarchs, and industry insiders are starting to sound the alarm: the current AI investment cycle is the most dangerous speculative surge in a generation. The question isn’t whether it will burst, but who will pay when it does. History tells us exactly where to look. When this bubble pops, low-income Black and Latine families will be left holding the bag—once again covering the costs of a boom that never included them.
In 2008, when the housing market crashed, it wasn’t the banks that paid the price. They were “too big to fail,” bailed out by the very taxpayers whose lives they ruined. Black and Latine families lost nearly half their collective wealth in a few short years. Entire neighborhoods were hollowed out by foreclosures, predatory refinancing, and austerity that gutted local city and municipal budgets.
We are dangerously close to repeating history. Big Tech is pouring trillions into inflating the AI bubble, venture capital poured nearly $200 billion into AI just this year, and data-center construction has exploded since 2022. Strip those investments out and the US economy would have grown just 0.1 percent in the first half of 2025. The Bureau of Labor Statistics recently revised last year’s job growth downward by more than 900,000 (the largest correction since the great recession), and holiday hiring is projected to be the lowest since 2009. In 2008, we bet America’s future on the strength of toxic mortgages and a handful of big banks holding their value. The American people lost, and now we’re going back to the table with tech companies convinced that a technology already underperforming expectations will someday soon deliver profits and prosperity.
When the housing bubble burst, approximately 10 million Americans lost their homes. This time, they could lose the lights. The AI boom is driving a surge in electricity demand, and utilities are scrambling to expand grids and build new plants to power data centers that each consume as much energy as a small city. Residential power bills have already risen by double, sometimes triple digits in states with large data center projects. For low-income families, especially Black and Latine households that already spend a disproportionate share of their income on utilities, that hit is devastating. Studies show data centers are far more likely to be built in low-income and majority-Black areas, with one recent study finding that nine of the ten counties bearing the brunt of new data center expansion are low-income communities with predominantly Black populations. In other words, the communities least able to afford higher bills are subsidizing the boom that threatens to hurt them most.
The communities least able to afford higher bills are subsidizing the boom that threatens to hurt them most.
The same extraction is happening through public budgets. Cities and counties–many in majority-Black or Latine regions–are issuing bonds, upgrading grids, and extending tax breaks to attract data centers they’re told will create jobs and stability. Utilities are planning massive fossil-fuel power plant and pipeline expansions. When the bubble pops and those projects stall, debts won’t vanish. They’ll sit on the books, forcing cuts to schools, transit, and local services that residents rely on every day. It’s the same shell game as 2008, just in a new form: profits are privatized, risk is socialized, and communities already living on the margins are once again left to clean up the wreckage.
It’s not just utility bills and budgets at risk. Pension funds—retirement systems tied to teachers, municipal workers, and public-sector unions—may be the quietest and perhaps most dangerous fault line in the coming crisis. Black and Latine families hold a disproportionate share of their wealth in public pensions, and those funds are now heavily invested in tech and AI equities, chasing short-term gains just as the bubble swells. In 2008, state and local pension funds lost a half-trillion dollars as markets collapsed, forcing governments to cut benefits and services. Pain from the AI crash won’t be felt by venture capitalists. It will be felt by bus drivers in Atlanta, nurses in Detroit, and teachers in Los Angeles – the people our cities and communities rely on every day.
When the crash comes, as it inevitably will, we need to recognize it not as an accident or market correction but as the predictable result of corporate greed without guardrails.
Like many other progressives and economic scholars, I was no fan of how the Obama administration handled the last financial crisis. He bailed out the big banks, shielded Wall Street executives from accountability, and let millions of homeowners fend for themselves. When this bubble pops, Trump will likely do the same by protecting the interests of the folks sitting behind him at his inauguration—the same tech oligarchs responsible for AI’s rise—rather than the Black and Latine communities he's declared war on.
We can still prevent that outcome. We need local action demanding regulators require tech firms to pay the full cost of their energy and infrastructure demands instead of letting them hide behind public utilities. States and cities should build firewalls—clauses that protect local budgets from stranded assets and pension funds from the AI-market crash. And any jurisdiction approving new data-center projects should require binding community benefits: direct bill credits, hiring guarantees, and revenue-sharing with the neighborhoods that bear the brunt of rising costs.
But policy alone won’t be enough. When the crash comes, as it inevitably will, we need to recognize it not as an accident or market correction but as the predictable result of corporate greed without guardrails. And we need to fight like hell to make sure the richest people in the world aren’t rescued yet again while the rest of us are left to clean up their mess.
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Economic Populism Is the Key to Rust Belt Votes
A new study found that progressive economic populism can win back Rust Belt voters—inside the Democratic Party where necessary, outside it where possible.
Oct 08, 2025
Democrats know they have a problem with working-class voters but don’t agree on the cause. Commentators chalk Kamala Harris’ 2024 loss to high prices, an unusually short campaign cycle, or voter resentment against the possibility of having an African American woman as president. But the Democratic Party’s working-class woes have much deeper roots.
Many voters in key battleground states feel burned by decades of Democrats’ unrealized promises to improve the lives of working people, failure to reign in obscene economic inequality, and support for economically disastrous policies—from NAFTA to the entrance of China to the World Trade Organization—that led to the loss of countless jobs and futures in their states.
A new study from the Center for Working-Class Politics (CWCP), with the Labor Institute and Rutgers University, uses a 3,000-person YouGov survey in Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio, and Pennsylvania to test whether economic populism—tapping into resentment and insecurity from decades of corporate excess and bipartisan neglect—can win back voters who’ve turned away from the Democratic Party.
Let’s start with the good news. Economic populism is popular among Rust Belt voters—particularly when it explicitly calls out corporate greed and mass layoffs. Strong economic populism—as opposed to “populist-lite” messaging that acknowledges there are few bad apples in the otherwise healthy barrel of large corporations—was particularly popular among many of the groups Democrats have struggled to reach: working-class voters, voters without a four-year college degree, voters whose incomes are less than $50k per year, and Latino voters.
If Democrats want to win, they’ll need to put delivering good jobs and holding corporations accountable at the center of everything they do and say.
But if economic populism is so popular, why did even the most stalwart Rust Belt economic populists—like former Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown—struggle in 2024? The survey reveals that the Democratic Party label often drags the message underwater. When the very same populist message was delivered by a candidate labeled “Democrat” rather than “Independent,” support dropped by an average of 8.4 points—a gap that balloons into double digits in Michigan, Ohio, and Wisconsin. In Pennsylvania, by contrast, there’s no meaningful penalty. In races decided by a few points, that brand discount can prove decisive.
To identify the best path forward for economic populists, the survey next assessed Rust Belt voters’ top economic policy priorities. Across ideological lines, respondents prioritized policies framed around fairness, anti-corruption, and economic security. Proposals like capping prescription drug prices, stopping corporate price gouging, and reigning in political corruption were among the top priorities regardless of partisanship or class. Policies to raise taxes on the wealthy and expand access to good jobs also performed well.
A new proposal barring companies that take taxpayer money from laying off workers also polled surprisingly well—and held up under Republican attacks. The policy was popular even though respondents had never heard of it and it challenges corporations’ right to chase short-term profit at communities’ expense, putting it well outside the acceptable range of mainstream Democratic economic proposals. The policy directly channels Rust Belt communities’ resentment over decades of mass layoffs into a commonsense rule—“if you take from the public, you can’t harm the public”—while signaling a tougher, jobs-first stance than Democrats typically embrace.
Costly or abstract proposals—such as $1,000 monthly payments to all Americans or a trillion-dollar industrial policy for clean energy—as well as traditional conservative ideas like corporate tax cuts and deregulation ranked poorly overall, drawing only pockets of partisan support.
The survey results suggest two simultaneous paths to success for economic populists. In competitive districts where running as an Independent would do little beyond ensure Republican victory, a party hoping to win back the working class should rebuild the Democratic brand by running disciplined and bold economic populist campaigns around policies to reduce costs, create good jobs, and hold elites accountable. Candidates who show independence from donor-class priorities and build a track record as champions of working-class priorities can still make the “D” stand for something again.
In other contexts, however, economic populists should test independent campaigns—following the model of Nebraska’s 2024 Independent Senate candidate Dan Osborne. This should be strategic, targeting deep-red districts and states where running outside the Democratic Party won’t simply hand the race to Republicans, but there are many places where it could be viable. The study also finds majority support for creating an Independent Workers Political Association to back such efforts, with enthusiasm highest among non-college voters, young people, voters of color, and the economically insecure, and with meaningful support from Independents and Republicans as well.
In short, progressive economic populism can win back Rust Belt voters—inside the Democratic Party where necessary, outside it where possible. The most effective strategy is not mysterious: Speak plainly about who profits from layoffs and price gouging and focus obsessively on policies that put workers first. If Democrats want to win, they’ll need to put delivering good jobs and holding corporations accountable at the center of everything they do and say. The path to victory in 2026 and beyond lies in giving voters a reason to believe that Democrats (and independent economic populists) have their backs while Republicans continue to cut workers’ benefits and do nothing to bring back jobs and dignity to long-suffering Rust Belt communities.
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