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hospitals
In Viral Video, Journalist Ronan Farrow Explains How Private Equity Is Destroying Hospitals
"These deals produce harm reliably enough that researchers can now count it."
Jul 08, 2026
Investigative journalist Ronan Farrow on Tuesday published a video on social media where he examines how private equity firms have been buying up hospitals throughout the US and saddling them with enormous debt burdens.
At the start of the video, Farrow notes that private equity firms such as The Carlyle Group, Cerberus, and Pinta have acquired hundreds of hospitals and nursing homes over the last 20 years.
"The pitch is generally: Infuse capital, cut inefficiency, and exit in five to seven years," Farrow explains. "And the deals work like this: A private equity firm puts some of its own money and borrows the rest. Typically, it'll borrow more than 70% of the purchase price."
"The twist is that debt doesn't sit on the firm's books," Farrow continues. "It gets placed on the facility itself, so the hospital or nursing home now carries the debt and the interest on it."
Studies now present a striking picture of what happens when private equity firms acquire hospitals and nursing homes: predictable increases in harm and deaths. One landmark study shows: patient deaths up about 11% after such acquisitions. pic.twitter.com/N6yfXJQIwW
— Ronan Farrow (@RonanFarrow) July 7, 2026
Farrow then cites research published by The Review of Financial Studies in 2023, which found healthcare facilities saw their interest payments more than triple after being acquired by private equity firms.
"In many cases," Farrow says, "private equity firms sold the nursing home's building shortly after acquiring it, returning the proceeds to investors, and then charging the facility rent on the building it used to own."
In addition to added debt burdens placed on hospitals and nursing homes, Farrow adds, the 2023 study found that private equity firms also cut staff hours after acquiring facilities, which has hurt patient care.
"The authors... found that private equity ownership can increase patient mortality by up to 11%," he says. "Over the study period, that translated to more than 20,000 lives lost."
Farrow then points to a 2025 study that found salaries of emergency room workers fall by an average of 18% in hospitals acquired by private equity firms, while hospital-acquired infections and complications rose by 25%.
Farrow concedes that not all private-equity deals turn out poorly and that some of the facilities are already in distress before being acquired.
However, he warns that "these deals produce harm reliably enough that researchers can now count it," adding that "so far, the industry has moved faster than the rules."
Research published Monday by the Private Equity Stakeholder Project (PESP) warned that private equity firms have been increasingly relying on nonprofit joint ventures to expand their reach throughout the US healthcare industry and "siphon profits from health systems and critical healthcare infrastructure."
"Private equity's healthcare playbook is evolving,” said Jim Baker, executive director of PESP. “Our research documents how private equity has increasingly relied on joint ventures with nonprofits to expand its presence in healthcare. These arrangements have received far less attention than traditional private equity buyouts, even as they become more common across hospitals and other healthcare sectors."
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At Shuttered Hospital, Platner Accuses Collins of 'Throwing Gasoline' on Raging Rural Healthcare Crisis
While Sen. Susan Collins "brags" that she's secured money for rural hospitals, the funding is a "pittance" compared to the billions in Medicaid cuts she helped push through, said her Democratic challenger in Maine.
Jul 01, 2026
Joined by medical professionals, patients, and local healthcare advocates outside a hospital in central Maine that was forced to shut down last year, Democratic US Senate candidate Graham Platner on Wednesday highlighted the human impact of the crisis that he said Sen. Susan Collins is actively making worse by prioritizing "health insurance companies, Big Pharma, and private equity firms" over Mainers—even as the Republican claims to bring crucial funds to the state's struggling rural hospitals.
Platner held a press conference outside the former Northern Light Inland Hospital in Waterville, Maine, which closed last May along with its associated primary care centers.
The closure left roughly 5,000 patients without general practitioners and further away from an emergency department and inpatient care, as well as putting more than 300 local residents out of work.
The hospital system said last May that it was closing Northern Light Inland due to rising operational costs, stagnant or reduced reimbursement rates, and a tight labor market with more competition for a smaller pool of qualified healthcare workers. A hospital official told Maine Public last year that the 48-bed facility was losing more than $1 million per month due to operating costs.
Since Northern Light Inland closed, said Platner, "Waterville Fire and Rescue has tripled its out-of-city ambulance transports," as there is no regular public transportation between Waterville and Augusta, where the nearest hospital is. Patients who were once charged $50 for a ride to the hospital now have to pay $400, the combat veteran and oyster farmer-turned-Senate candidate said, "and a ride that is longer means higher mortality rates."
One former patient of the healthcare center, Kyla Mihalovits, said her family was "thrown into a state of uncertainty regarding our access to healthcare" after Northern Light Inland closed and her primary care provider relocated to Unity, Maine.
"When your community no longer has access to high-quality [healthcare], it doesn't matter if you identify as a Democrat or a Republican or an Independent. You have lost something that your community needs to survive."
"We consider ourselves lucky to get an appointment once a year for our annual checkups. Many of my friends and neighbors lost their doctors and are on excruciatingly long waiting lists," said Mihalovits, adding that she no longer has access to women's healthcare and does not know where she will obtain her first mammogram after she turns 40 this year.
"Because my hospital closed, I no longer have any semblance of continuity of care available for me at this crucial time in my life," she said. "For women, especially since we are very often not listened to, dismissed, or even believed by certain healthcare providers, especially when we see them for the first time, continuity of care is crucial. Because our community hospital closed, it will take years for my family to establish care outside of our community."
Stories like Mihalovits', said Platner, show that "rural healthcare is not collapsing sometime in the future. This isn't some vague thing we talk about that may happen someday. It is happening now, but it is not an accident. No rural hospital closes by chance. It's the outcome of policy, and it is a choice that people in places of political power like Susan Collins have made."
Rural hospitals in Maine are projected to continue closing due to nearly $3 billion in Medicaid cuts that are expected to hit the state over the next 10 years—cuts that were included in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA), a law that also included tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy and whose passage Collins helped ensure by casting a decisive vote to send it to the Senate floor.
"Before the bill's passage, nearly half of Maine's rural hospitals were found to be at risk of closing while some, like the one here today, had already shuttered," said Platner. "The One Big Beautiful Bill is doing exactly what the experts warned it would do. It is throwing gasoline on a crisis that was already raging in Maine's rural hospitals."
The Senate candidate emphasized that Collins voted to advance the bill out of committee "one day after a private equity billionaire, Stephen Schwarzman, the chair of [Blackstone], and a man who will personally reap huge profits from the bill, gave $2 million towards her reelection campaign."
Collins frequently emphasizes that she ultimately voted against the OBBBA almost exactly a year ago—after Republican leaders had secured enough votes to pass the legislation without her—but Platner stressed that "her vote was pivotal to advancing it and paving the way for its eventual passage. She knew what she was doing. She was profiting off of her vote."
He also took particular issue with the five-term senator's "bragging" about the Rural Health Transformation Program, a $50 billion fund also included in the OBBBA through which, Collins said in a recent ad, she secured $190 million for Maine rural health systems.
"She likes to brag," said Platner, "that she uses her power to bring money to Maine to help the state, except that the money she brings is a pittance. It is a pittance in comparison to the money sucked out of the state through tax cuts for corporations and billionaires that she happily goes along with. It is a pittance to the money sucked out of our system in the forever wars that we send trillions to year after year that she has always supported. A pittance toward the billions of dollars we continue to send to Israel to fund a genocide in Gaza."
The candidate, who is a proponent of Medicare for All, added that "people see through" Collins' claims that she is a "moderate" Republican.
"The idea that she stands up for the needs of Mainers over that of corporations is really laid bare with something just like the Rural Health Transformation Program," Platner told Common Dreams. "The numbers don't lie. It's very obvious what she's doing. And I am seeing in every single corner of the state and hearing from not just Democrats, but Independents and Republicans, who fundamentally understand that Susan Collins is someone who, for decades now, has represented not their interests, but the interests of those who donate the most money to her. And they're sick and tired of it."
While Collins has boasted that the program included in the OBBBA is helping rural Maine residents, the law is already harming millions of people across the country and making it harder for them to access crucial healthcare a year after it was signed by President Donald Trump. According to Protect Our Care, 3.8 million Americans have lost coverage through Medicaid and the Children's Health Insurance Program since the law was passed. Fifteen million people are projected to lose their healthcare by 2034. More than 1,000 hospitals, clinics, and nursing homes have shut down since the OBBBA was passed, as well as 40 maternity wards.
"When your community no longer has access to high-quality [healthcare], it doesn't matter if you identify as a Democrat or a Republican or an Independent," said Platner. "You have lost something that your community needs to survive and you have lost it because establishment politicians like Susan Collins have for decades fought not for your community, have fought not for the needs of working Mainers, but have fought to protect the profits of health insurance companies, corporations, and private equity, and that must come to an end."
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900 Health Facilities Shutting Down or at Risk of Collapse as Trump-GOP Cuts ‘Ripple Across the Country’
"Providers are stretched thin, doing everything they can as resources disappear and the system buckles under the pressure of Republicans cutting more than $1 trillion from healthcare."
May 05, 2026
An advocacy group tracking the impacts of the unprecedented Medicaid cuts that congressional Republicans and President Donald Trump enacted last year said Monday that at least 900 hospitals, nursing homes, and other healthcare facilities are now shutting down or at risk of closure—a disaster for low-income Americans who lack easy access to care.
Protect Our Care's Hospital Crisis Watch project has identified healthcare centers that have closed or are at risk of closing, cutting services, and shutting down wards as they grapple with the impacts of the GOP's 2025 budget law, which included over $1 trillion in total healthcare cuts over the next decade. More than $900 billion of the cuts will come from Medicaid, which pays hospitals and other providers for services delivered to low-income patients.
"Hospital Crisis Watch has now reached 900 pins, 900 communities where access to care is evaporating as Republicans’ healthcare cuts ripple across the country,” said Brad Woodhouse, president of Protect Our Care. “Providers are stretched thin, doing everything they can as resources disappear and the system buckles under the pressure of Republicans cutting more than $1 trillion from health care to fund tax breaks for billionaires and big corporations."
"Families are driving further for care, parents are scrambling to find services for their kids, and seniors are being left without the support they need," Woodhouse continued. "Care is getting harder to access, in too many places, disappearing entirely, and communities are left to deal with the consequences."
The impacts of the Trump-GOP Medicaid cuts have been felt in both urban and rural areas, despite Republicans' inclusion of a $50 billion Rural Health Transformation Fund that supporters touted as a way to bolster at-risk healthcare facilities. Critics of the fund have warned from the start that it would not be nearly enough to offset the devastation caused by massive Medicaid cuts. (The Trump-GOP law includes an estimated $137 billion in cuts to Medicaid in rural areas.)
"In Nebraska and other states, rural hospitals are facing across-the-board cuts—and the rural health fund Congress created to offset the impact of Medicaid cuts on rural healthcare is falling short," Adam Searing, an associate professor at the Georgetown University McCourt School of Public Policy’s Center for Children and Families, wrote in a blog post last week.
"What is quickly becoming clear, even at this early stage, is that as a result of the cuts enacted by Congress, healthcare is going to become much harder to access for many people," wrote Searing. "Rural areas and small towns across the country will be particularly affected."
The latest assessments of surging healthcare facility cuts and closures across the US came as Nebraska became the first state to implement the punitive work requirements that the 2025 Republican law imposes on some Medicaid recipients. Early estimates indicate that more than 20,000 Nebraskans could lose Medicaid coverage due to the stringent work requirements and the procedural hurdles the new mandates entail.
States must implement the new work requirements by the start of 2027.
"Everyone who is eligible for Medicaid will be at risk of having their health coverage taken away—whether or not the work requirement applies to them, and whether or not they prove their compliance or exemption status if it does—because the administrative burden of implementing the work requirement strains a state’s entire Medicaid system," Farah Erzouki, a senior policy analyst at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, warned last week.
"Without sufficient time and guidance," Erzouki added, "states will be unable to implement these requirements without harming many more eligible people and millions will lose coverage."
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While Cost of Living Soars and Healthcare Taken Away, Trump Spending $1 Billion Per Day in War of Choice With Iran
"We can't afford to keep our hospitals open, but we can afford a billion dollars a day to bomb Iran?"
Mar 05, 2026
With fresh reporting that the ongoing US assault on Iran could be costing $1 billion per day in taxpayer money, opposition lawmakers, candidates for office, and outside critics are ripping the Trump administration and his allies in Congress for the financial recklessness of the unlawful and unprovoked attack on the Iranian people.
"We can't afford to keep our hospitals open, but we can afford a billion dollars a day to bomb Iran?" asked Graham Platner, a Democrat running to unseat Republican Sen. Susan Collin of Maine in this year's midterm elections, in a social media post Wednesday.
Hundreds of hospitals across the US, most of them in rural areas, are teetering on the brink of bankruptcy or closure in the wake of Trump's signing of a spending and tax giveaway bill last year that gave billions in tax breaks to corporations and the wealthy while slashing healthcare, including Medicaid.
Collins on Wednesday joined all but one member of the Republican caucus in the US Senate to vote down a War Powers Resolution that would have compelled Trump to cease military operations against Iran.
"In one fucking month we will spend more over there than we needed to save healthcare for more than 2 million Americans. They literally are taking away your food and your healthcare for this regime change war of choice." —Sen. Brian Schatz
Planter was responding to journalist Nancy Youssef of The Atlantic, who reported, citing a congressional official, that a "preliminary Pentagon cost estimate of the war in Iran is $1 billion a day."
Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) expressed similar outrage to the figure.
"This war is costing a billion dollars a day," said Schatz. "In one fucking month we will spend more over there than we needed to save healthcare for more than 2 million Americans. They literally are taking away your food and your healthcare for this regime change war of choice."
An analysis by Allison McManus at the Center for American Progress published Tuesday estimates that the US costs since bombing raids were launched by the American and Israeli forces over the weekend easily exceed $5 billion. According to McManus:
In a March 2 press conference, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Dan Caine provided a glimpse into the nature of operations thus far in Operation Epic Fury. Caine described the deployment of more than 100 aircraft, the use of Tomahawk missiles, and attacks on more than 1,000 targets in just the first day of operations. Utilizing Brown University’s “Costs of War” project cost estimates of previous operations in the region—including Operation Midnight Hammer against Iran last June and engaging the Houthis in Yemen—it is likely that the operations Caine described alone would cost more than $4 billion.
But these are not the only costs. Elaine McCusker, a former Pentagon official in the first Trump administration, estimated the costs of repositioning forces in the Middle East to be around $630 million even prior to the start of hostilities. On March 2, Kuwaiti forces accidentally shot down three F-15 fighter jets in a friendly-fire incident. As these aircraft can cost as much as $117 million, this translates to an estimated total loss of $351 million. Added to the operations Caine described, a conservative estimate for the initial costs of Operation Epic Fury is more than $5 billion as of March 2—and the campaign is just getting started.
McManus further notes that the billions in military spending for a war that polls show a large majority in the US oppose, "come at a time when American citizens are acutely feeling the pressures of increased prices at home, including housing, energy, and health care costs."
As independent journalist Zaid Jilani noted, "Trump is spending a billion dollars a day killing people abroad while cutting Medicaid and health care for Americans."
"Waging a senseless and costly war raises legitimate questions about this government’s priorities," argues McManus in her analysis. "Priced at around $2.2 million, a single Tomahawk missile could cover 775 children on Medicaid for a year or provide more than 3,600 children with meals in the National School Lunch Program. At more than $5 billion and counting, the costs of Operation Epic Fury—in only its first few days of operations—could cover Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits for more than 2 million Americans for a year. If this war continues at the same pace, Americans could see their government burn through tens of billions of dollars, funds that would amount to the cost of Medicaid for millions in the United States."
John Collins, political writer based in Boston, was contemplative about the military expenditures. "Just thinking of what we could do with a billion dollars a day that doesn’t include bombing people," Collins said.
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'It Should Be Common Sense': Sanders to Headline Billionaire Tax Campaign Kickoff in California
"Our country needs access to hospitals and emergency rooms, not more tax breaks for billionaires."
Feb 10, 2026
US Sen. Bernie Sanders is headed to Los Angeles next week to lead a campaign kickoff for a bill that would impose a one-time 5% tax on the assets of California's billionaires to support the state's healthcare system, including by keeping hospitals and emergency departments open.
Economists, healthcare workers, and unions launched the fight for the tax last year, after Republicans in Congress and President Donald Trump enacted a budget package that included massive Medicaid cuts. Service Employees International Union-United Healthcare Workers West (SEIU-UHW) is spearheading the battle for the California Billionaire Tax Act.
Sanders (I-Vt.) endorsed the proposal in December, calling it "a model that should be emulated throughout the country." He is now set to appear at the Wiltern in Los Angeles alongside musical acts and other supporters of the ballot measure for the bill on Wednesday, February 18.
"At a time of unprecedented and growing wealth consolidation and income inequality, I strongly support the grassroots effort in California to impose this reasonable and necessary 5% wealth tax on about 200 California billionaires," Sanders said in a Tuesday statement.
"This initiative would provide the necessary funding to prevent over 3 million working-class Californians from losing the healthcare they currently have—and would help prevent the closures of California hospitals and emergency rooms," noted the senator, a longtime leading advocate of higher taxes for the ultrarich and Medicare for All.
"It should be common sense that the billionaires pay just slightly more so that entire communities can preserve access to lifesaving medical care," he added. "Our country needs access to hospitals and emergency rooms, not more tax breaks for billionaires."
Mayra Castaneda, an ultrasound technologist at St. Francis Medical Center in Lynwood, said that "we are very grateful for the support of US Sen. Sanders, who for years has been telling the truth about the threat that income inequality poses to our nation—and to working people."
"If we let these healthcare cuts stand, my patients will suffer," Castaneda stressed. "Hospitals and ERs will close, others will be strained by taking on more patients, and people will lose access to lifesaving care."
"This is all avoidable if billionaires just pay their fair share in California, so I'm going to do whatever is in my power to see this proposal pass in November," Castaneda continued. "I'll be telling my story alongside Sen. Sanders and urging my fellow Californians to take action to save lives."
Healthcare experts warn a crisis is here. Congress’s “Big, Beautiful Bill” cuts $100B from CA healthcare. LA Times: “People will die.” A one-time 5% billionaire tax can backfill the cuts and protect care.https://lat.ms/4amFfYK
[image or embed]
— SEIU-United Healthcare Workers West (@seiu-uhw.bsky.social) February 4, 2026 at 7:00 PM
According to the Los Angeles Times, which first reported on the upcoming event: "The supporters need to gather the signatures of nearly 875,000 registered voters and submit them to county elections officials by June 24 for the measure to qualify for the November ballot. They began gathering signatures in January."
While the bill targeting the state's billionaires is backed by Sanders—who caucuses with Democrats in Congress and twice sought the party's presidential nomination—its opponents include Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom, who is expected to run for president in 2028.
"Gavin Newsom is on the side of the billionaires, not the millions of working people who stand to lose healthcare because of the Trump cuts," progressive organizer Jonathan Rosenblum said after the governor made his position clear last month. "Shamefully typical of the Democratic establishment."
The Times noted Tuesday that other opponents include "San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan, who is among a dozen candidates running in November to replace the termed-out governor."
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We Need to Get the Private Healthcare Incentives Out of Our Hospital Bathrooms
An attempt to procure toilet paper and face tissues during a hospital stay illustrates everything that's wrong with the US healthcare system.
Dec 20, 2025
Have you ever seen quality toilet paper in a hospital restroom? Seriously. Most of the time, we are all just damned lucky if we have a clean bathroom in the patient’s room, and we all know the situation with most hospitals’ public restrooms (yuck).
Decent toilet paper seems to be a small request to make of your hospital given that the status of our bodily functions (digestive issues or issues causing digestive issues) is often the reason for hospitalization. And sometimes we must get well enough to have our digestive systems functioning to be released. The health industry earns massive profits—so much more in daily charges than any hotel room you or I have ever imagined staying in—and yet the decisions made about our most basic comforts related to personal hygiene don’t reflect those profits at all.
With Congress deciding to dump the Affordable Care Act subsidies, hospitals will have to tighten their belts even more to retain their precious profits, so I doubt we will be getting Charmin and Puffs any time soon.
Well, most hospitals secure their cheap, one-ply toilet paper under lock and key. I couldn’t believe it, though you’d think I would by now. Like they are guarding gold at Fort Knox, the hospital corporations protect their toilet paper and paper towel assets more than they protect patients by locking up the worst and cheapest paper products they could secure. Having extra replacement rolls anywhere seems really a stretch for these facilities too. And if the staff who hold the keys are not at work or if the hospital is short-staffed like many are these days, getting paper products may be on you. It sure was for us, and HCA Healthcare is true to that trend of cutting corners on one of the items that “touches” patients and their families.
Not having toilet paper to wipe a sore bottom or tissue to blow your nose is one thing. We wonder who buys the supplies for the operating room?
I begged people to find us toilet paper and paper towels—nurses when I could find one, techs when they had one, housekeeping on the days there was one, and even tried teasing that I’d bring it from home. The first day we got by, but by the fifth day we were weary of the begging and saying, “Pretty please” to anyone who looked like they might give a damn. No one did until one young man cleaning an empty room figured out that if I was asking for his bucket and mop, I might need help somewhere. He was getting that empty room ready to fill again with more revenue—a new patient—no time for him to attend to patients already in a room languishing without needed services and no toilet paper.
I sent messages through the patient portal because no one answered any admin lines for patients and families. Surprise, surprise, surprise.
MyHealthONE Help Desk
Please get my husband paper towels & TP in his bathroom and clean the room
You
(Sent) 8/9/2025
at 5:02 pm
We know it's a weekend, and we are very sorry its hard to staff the hospital appropriately for that, but I'd like my husband to have paper towel and toilet paper in his bathroom so I do not have to provide paper products to him from outside PSLs in Denver. I need a mop and cleaning supplies to clean his room as well. I'll do it because yesterday, Friday, only one tech had to cover the floor, one cleaning person stuck her head in and said it looked good, and today it is gross. Just gross. My husband has tried to clean his own bathroom several times. If he is hurt doing that, I fear the problems that will create for him. Please help us. Please.
I hope you will follow here that if they will do this with basic supplies and services, my friends, what do you think they do with all the other purchases they make to run the hospital?
I’m sharing my DoorDash receipt copy below as a cautionary tale:
Door Dash Order Complete
Saturday, August 9, 2025 at 5:42 pm
Enjoy!
Your Dasher: [Redacted]
Total $19.79;
Retail Delivery Fees $0.29
Delivery Fee $2.99
Service Fee $3.00, $.99
Estimated Tax $1.66
Dasher Tip $5.00
Total $27.73
Payment
[Redacted] · 8/9/2025 · 5:26 pm
$27.73
Address
1719 E 19th Ave
Denver, CO 80218
Instructions: I will meet you at the curb of the Main entrance, main lobby of PresStLukes Hospital. You need to hand this order directly to me.
I sat in the lobby of a health industry behemoth that made more than $600 million in clear profit last year and received my delivery order. Exhausted from being the unpaid staff of the hospital—Presbyterian St. Lukes in Denver, an HCA Healthcare facility—at least I had tissue to wipe my nose that didn’t leave me raw and bleeding like their protected paper did. I cried a lot, and no one had a tissue. Patients are not given facial tissue anymore nor are they given other personal hygiene items. It must be an expense they just couldn’t justify.
None of this ought to make you feel safe. Not having toilet paper to wipe a sore bottom or tissue to blow your nose is one thing. We wonder who buys the supplies for the operating room? The neonatal intensive care unit? Do they cut those same corners with everything? What do you think?
The only way out of this mess is to finally pass universal single payer, improved and expanded Medicare for All and get the profit incentives out of our hospital bathrooms. Please.
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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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For-Profit Healthcare Makes Us Sick!
The harmful behaviors of profit-driven healthcare companies—from tax dodging to insurance denials to carelessness with patient safety—stem from the same illness: a disregard for the community they serve.
Nov 02, 2025
Even though most of us think of healthcare as a human right, the reality is that in the United States the provision of healthcare is big business. It places profits over people, demonstrating that priority through tax dodging, price gouging, insurance denials, and unsafe conditions for patients, as documented in a recent joint report from our two organizations, Americans for Tax Fairness and Community Catalyst.
The report, “Sick Profits,” highlights how seven healthcare corporations have together saved over $34 billion in federal taxes thanks to the 2017 Trump-GOP tax law recently extended by the current Trump administration and Republican Congress. They paid for those corporate tax breaks in part by cutting Medicaid and jeopardizing health coverage for 15 million people, and failing to preserve the enhanced premium tax credits for people buying health insurance through the Affordable Care Act (ACA) Marketplaces.
We currently have public policy that cuts taxes on corporations while ignoring nearly two-thirds of people who believe that big companies are not paying enough. Instead, healthcare corporations have each enjoyed hundreds of millions—in most cases, billions—of dollars in tax savings thanks to the Republican tax law, the most expensive part of which was a two-fifths cut in the corporate tax rate. They have also saved taxes by exploiting loopholes that the law (and its extension) failed to close, including in the accounting for stock options and the treatment of profits shifted offshore.
Not surprisingly, the companies examined in the report did not use their tax savings to lower prices, hire more providers, or improve patient care. No, the money went instead to higher executive compensation and increased payouts to shareholders through dividends and stock buybacks.
We must demand more transparency, fairer tax policy, and better oversight of these institutions.
Additionally, companies are maximizing their profits by simply not paying for care. By demanding “preauthorization” for a dizzying number of procedures then routinely denying approval, insurers can save billions at the expense of their policyholders. High percentages of initial denials are overturned on appeal, showing that “no” is simply the initial default position, taken in the hopes that patients and doctors won’t push the issue. Claim denials often result in medical debt and can also disrupt treatment for chronic medical conditions, delay or deny access to lifesaving care, and lead to avoidable complications—or even death.
Claim denials affect the health and well-being of people every day. They are people like Little John Cupp, who began feeling short of breath and experienced swelling in his feet and ankles. His doctor recommended a catheter exam to determine whether the arteries in his heart were blocked. However, the medical benefits management company EviCore (owned by Cigna) twice denied the catheter exam while eventually approving a much lower-cost stress test. The delay in diagnosis proved catastrophic. Less than two days after Mr. Cupp received the stress test, he died of cardiac arrest.
The tragedy of the end of Mr. Cupp’s life demonstrates the incredibly real risks that the first obstacle to getting care creates. Unfortunately, clearing that hurdle and receiving approval for care does not ensure quality. You could find yourself getting treatment at a facility saving money for shareholders by reducing staff and failing to maintain safe and hygienic conditions. NBC News aired a six-part investigation of hospital-operator HCA Holdings that uncovered, in the words of our report, “roaches in the operating room, leaking ceilings, essentially unmonitored vital signs, overworked nurses, overcrowded emergency rooms, closed departments, and other threats to patient health and safety.”
Or you may receive care at a facility owned or controlled by private equity interests. One cautionary tale is Prospect Medical Holdings, which operated hospitals and other health facilities in multiple states and was driven into bankruptcy after it was acquired by a private equity firm that extracted over $650 million in debt-financed dividends from the targeted company. While the private equity partners enjoyed lucrative payouts, patients suffered from unsanitary conditions, supply shortages, insufficient staffing, and shuttered departments.
Our diagnosis is simple but serious. The harmful behaviors of profit-driven healthcare companies—from tax dodging to insurance denials to carelessness with patient safety—stem from the same illness: a disregard for the community they serve. We must demand more transparency, fairer tax policy, and better oversight of these institutions. That means closing tax loopholes, raising the corporate tax rate, curbing the routine denials of coverage, and strengthening regulatory oversight of health facilities. That’s the only way to ensure that people’s needs are prioritized over corporate profits.
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'It Will Kill People': HHS Proposal Targeting Transgender Healthcare Could Cause Even More Hospitals to Close
One advocate said the proposed rule would force hospitals "to choose between providing lifesaving care for trans people or maintaining the ability to serve patients through Medicare and Medicaid."
Oct 30, 2025
A pair of extreme new Trump administration rules aimed at functionally banning gender-affirming healthcare for transgender youth could force even more hospitals to close down.
NPR reported Thursday that the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) drafted a proposed rule that would prohibit federal Medicaid reimbursement for medical care provided to transgender patients younger than 18 and prohibit the same from the Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP) for patients under 19.
Another proposed rule goes even further, blocking all Medicaid and Medicare funding to hospitals that provide gender-affirming care to youth.
As Erin Reed, an independent journalist who reports on LGBTQ+ rights, explained, this "would effectively eliminate access to such care nationwide, except at the few private clinics able to forgo Medicaid entirely, a rarity in transgender youth medicine."
The policies are of a piece with the Trump administration and the broader Republican Party's efforts to eliminate transgender healthcare for youth across the country.
Bans on gender-affirming care for those under 18 have already been passed in 27 states, despite evidence that early access to treatments like puberty blockers and hormones can save lives.
As Reed pointed out, a Cornell University review of more than 51 studies shows that access to such care dramatically reduces the risk of suicide and the rates of anxiety and depression among transgender adolescents.
The new HHS rules are being prepared for public release in November and would not be finalized for several more months.
But if passed, the ramifications could extend far beyond transgender people, impacting the entire healthcare system, for which federal funding from Medicare and Medicaid is a load-bearing piece. According to a report last year from the American Hospital Association, 96% of hospitals in the US have more than half their inpatient days paid for by Medicare and Medicaid.
It is already becoming apparent what happens when even some of that funding is taken away. As a result of the massive GOP budget law passed in July, an estimated $1 trillion is expected to be cut from Medicaid over the next decade. According to an analysis released Thursday by Protect Our Care, which maintains a Hospital Crisis Watch database, more than 500 healthcare providers across the country are already at risk of shutting down due to the budget cuts.
Tyler Hack, the executive director of the Christopher Street Project, a transgender rights organization, said that the newly proposed HHS rule would be "forcing hospitals to choose between providing lifesaving care for trans people or maintaining the ability to serve patients through Medicare and Medicaid."
"Today’s news marks a dangerous overreach by the executive branch, pitting trans people, low-income families, disabled people, and seniors against each other and making hospitals choose which vulnerable populations to serve," Hack said. "If these rules become law, it will kill people."
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Doctors Without Borders Suspends Operations at Gaza City Clinics ‘Encircled by Israeli Forces’
"We have been left with no choice but to stop our activities,” said the humanitarian group's Gaza coordinator. "This is the last thing we wanted."
Sep 26, 2025
The humanitarian organization Doctors Without Borders has been forced to suspend all its medical operations in Gaza City as its clinics have come under "escalating attacks from Israeli forces."
In a statement published Friday, the group—officially known as Médecins Sans Frontières—said "the relentless Israeli offensive in Gaza City, Palestine, has forced [MSF] to suspend vital medical activities in the area due to the rapidly deteriorating security situation.
"The situation includes continued airstrikes and advancing tanks less than one kilometer from our healthcare facilities," the group continued. "The escalating attacks from Israeli forces have created an unacceptable level of risk for our staff, forcing us to suspend lifesaving medical activities."
As the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) have pushed further into Gaza's largest city in recent days, hundreds of thousands of people have been forcibly displaced, and hundreds of thousands more have been trapped in the besieged city.
Israel's genocidal assault on Gaza has destroyed much of the strip's healthcare infrastructure and inflicted widespread disease and starvation.
Since it began in October 2023, MSF has provided over 1.1 million medical consultations, including in over 347,000 emergency cases, according to its website.
Just this week, even as Gaza City was pounded with airstrikes, the group says it carried out over 3,640 consultations and treated 1,655 people with malnutrition. They have also treated patients with severe trauma injuries and burns, as well as pregnant women and others who are unable to leave the city.
Earlier this month, Israel ordered everyone in Gaza City, over 1 million people, to evacuate or face the threat of military force. Hundreds of thousands have fled south. When the order was issued, MSF warned that it would be a "death sentence" for the many critically ill patients and newborn babies who'd be forced to abandon medical treatment.
"While large numbers of people have fled south due to evacuation orders, there are still hundreds of thousands in Gaza City, who are unable to leave and have no other option but to stay," MSF said. "Those who are able to leave face an impossible choice: either remain in Gaza City under intense military operations and the deterioration of law and order, or abandon what’s left of their houses, their belongings, and their memories, to move to areas where humanitarian conditions are rapidly collapsing."
The Gaza Health Ministry reported that 60 Palestinians have been killed and dozens more injured since dawn on Friday, bringing the official death toll since October 2023 to 65,549 people and the number of wounded to 167,518.
Meanwhile, at least seven hospitals have been forced to close due to heavy bombardment. Munir al-Bursh, the director general of Gaza’s Health Ministry, told Al Jazeera on Tuesday that Israeli attacks have killed at least 1,723 healthcare workers and damaged 38 hospitals since the war began in October 2023.
“We have been left with no choice but to stop our activities, as our clinics are encircled by Israeli forces,” says Jacob Granger, the emergency coordinator for MSF in Gaza. “This is the last thing we wanted, as the needs in Gaza City are enormous, with the most vulnerable people—infants in neonatal care, those with severe injuries and life-threatening illnesses—unable to move and in grave danger.”
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