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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.
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.
The five-term Maine senator's populist opponent has seized on her ties to Wall Street, saying: "I don't think private equity deserves more time with a senator than someone who works two jobs to get by."
As she gears up for a tough midterm race against a progressive challenger in 2026, Sen. Susan Collins is struggling to shake her reputation as a sellout to corporate interests. A new report out Wednesday may make that even more difficult.
Collins (R-Maine) was one of just three Republican senators not to vote for President Donald Trump's "One Big Beautiful Bill" Act in July, which slashes over $1 trillion from Medicaid to help pay for tax cuts for the rich and is expected to result in over 10 million people losing health insurance coverage.
But Collins did cast a crucial vote to advance the legislation to the Senate floor. An exclusive report from Tessa Stuart in Rolling Stone gives us damning insight into a possible reason why:
[Collins] cast that vote just one day after private equity billionaire Steve Schwarzman, the chair of the Blackstone Group and a man who will personally reap huge rewards from the bill, kicked in $2 million toward her reelection effort.
On June 27, Schwarzman gave $2 million to Pine Tree Results PAC, a Super PAC backing Collins; on June 28, Collins cast a decisive vote allowing Trump's bill to advance to the floor. The vote was 51-49. Vice President JD Vance was present at the Capitol, on hand to break a tie, but was not needed after Collins voted in favor of the bill.
The bill went on to pass the Senate just a few days later, to Schwarzman's presumed delight, since the legislation both extended the pass-through business deduction—treasured by the owners of private equity firms—and made it permanent, allowing partnerships to deduct 20% of their pre-tax income.
Collins' office has strongly denied that Schwarzman's influence had anything to do with her vote to advance the bill. As press secretary Blake Kernen noted, a tie in the Senate would have been broken by Vance, so "the motion to proceed would have passed without her vote."
However, Stuart notes that this was not Collins' first conspicuous donation from Schwarzman or the private equity industry at large.
According to OpenSecrets, Collins' campaign committee and leadership PAC received over $715,000 from private equity and investment firms—more money than any other person elected to Congress during the 2020 election cycle. It included maximum individual contributions from both Schwarzman and his wife.
That number does not include an additional $2 million that Schwarzman donated to her reelection super PAC in 2020. As Stuart points out, this donation came after Collins dropped a proposed amendment to Trump's 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, opposed by private equity. That amendment would have "[made] childcare more affordable, by making changes to the private equity industry's beloved carried interest loophole," Stuart wrote.
While Collins denies that her votes are influenced by the piles of money gifted to her by private equity, one of her most formidable challengers in 2026, oyster farmer and Marine veteran Graham Platner, has often seized on her extensive industry ties to hold her up as the poster child for the "oligarchy" he is trying to unseat from power.
"I believe that input from working people is far more important than input from someone who simply has money," Platner thundered during a Labor Day speech in Portland alongside Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.). "I believe that we shouldn't be settling for crumbs while billionaires eat the cookie we baked. I don't think private equity deserves more time with a senator than someone who works two jobs to get by."
If Democrats are going to regain the Senate in 2026, Maine will be an essential state to win, something that looks increasingly possible as approval ratings for Collins have plummeted over the first half-year of Trump's second term.
Nearly 7,000 attended Platner's speech, during which he railed against the five-term senator Collins' long history of casting "symbolic" dissenting votes against her party, like opposing Trump's tax legislation, or voting to codify Roe v. Wade, to posture as a "moderate" without actually disrupting their agenda.
"Susan Collins' charade is wearing thin," Platner said Monday. "No one cares that you pretend to be remorseful as you sell out to lobbyists. No one cares while you sell out to corporations, and no one cares while you sell out to a president, who are all engineering the greatest redistribution of wealth from the working class to the ruling class in American history."
"Private equity comes in, squeezes the life out of hospitals and doctor's offices, and then leaves patients and communities in the lurch," says a report from Sen. Chris Murphy.
A US senator on Wednesday released a report that detailed how private equity firms have ruined hospitals in his home state and across the country.
The report from Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) documented what happened when three Connecticut hospitals—Waterbury Hospital, Rockville General, and Manchester Memorial—were bought by Prospect Medical Holdings, a private equity-backed healthcare firm.
Interviews conducted with staff members of these hospitals told a consistent story about how Prospect cut corners in nearly every conceivable aspect and worsened the care patients received at the hospitals.
Ramona, an operating room assistant at Waterbury Hospital cited in the report, explained how Prospect went to extreme lengths to avoid spending money. She explained to Murphy that Prospect at one point stopped paying vendors, which resulted in supplies eventually growing "so scarce patients were sometimes left on the operating table while staff scrambled" to find the necessary equipment.
Staff members eventually started buying supplies themselves, with some even going so far as to buy food for their patients to ensure that they did not go hungry.
A nurse named Anne-Marie, who has worked at Manchester Memorial for over three decades, told Murphy's staff that it was only through the dedication of staff members that her hospital was able to continue functioning at all.
"You know, I'm very fortunate where I work that we still care and patients can't believe what a good job we do despite all of the obstacles and hurdles we've been given," she said. "We still show up every day and we're committed to our communities, thankfully."
Prospect didn't just skimp on buying supplies for the hospitals but also on maintaining the buildings themselves. A unit secretary at Waterbury Hospital named Carmen told Murphy's staff of two instances where the ceiling at the building literally fell down due to years of neglect.
"We were lucky enough that the patient had already been discharged and where it fell, it would have missed the stretcher and the patient," she said of the first instance. "The other time it fell in the trauma room, it was only on top of the computers... so we called maintenance, and they came and fixed it, [which means] putting a little hose where the water is and putting buckets to catch the water…it's happened a lot."
The deterioration of patient care at Waterbury became obvious by 2019, when the report noted that it "recorded the highest rates of patient readmission in the state."
Things got even worse for the hospitals when Leonard Green & Partners, the private equity firm that at the time owned Prospect, decided to sell the land where the hospitals reside to a real estate investment firm that then leased the land back at high rates. The final blow came when Leonard Green sold off its stake in Prospect, which the report says left "nothing but debt and destruction" in its wake.
"After Leonard Green's exit, Rockville Hospital was losing so much money, they cut all but emergency and outpatient mental health services without the required state authorization, leaving many patients with no full-service hospital nearby," the report stated.
Prospect itself filed for bankruptcy earlier this year, and the fate of all three hospitals is now "in the hands of a bankruptcy judge in Texas," the report added.
Murphy's report also emphasized that the story of private equity stripping hospitals for parts is not unique to his state.
"The story of these three Connecticut hospitals is playing out in healthcare systems all over the country," it said. "Private equity comes in, squeezes the life out of hospitals and doctor's offices, and then leaves patients and communities in the lurch."