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Chokwe Lumumba maintained a civil rights commitment that was rooted in the moment when his mother showed her eight-year-old son the Jet magazine photograph of a beaten Emmett Till in his open casket. The commitment was nurtured on the streets of Detroit, where Lumumba and his mother collected money to support the Southern Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the civil rights struggles of the early 1960s.
The mayor's death ended an epic journey that challenged conventions, upset the status quo and proved the potential of electoral politics to initiate radical change -- even in a conservative southern state.
As a young man, inspired by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr's struggle to address "infectious discrimination, racism and apartheid," and shocked into a deeper activism by King's assassination, Lumumba changed his name from Edwin Taliaferro--taking his new first name from an African tribe that had resisted slavery and his new last name from the Congolese independence leader Patrice Lumumba.
Chokwe Lumumba became a human rights lawyer "defending political prisoners people who are being prosecuted because of their political beliefs." His clients would eventually include former Black Panthers and rapper Tupac Shakur. His remarkable list of legal accomplishments included his key role in the 2010 decision of Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour to suspend the sentences of Jamie and Gladys Scott, Mississippi sisters who were released after serving 16 years of consecutive life sentences for an $11 robbery -- a punishment that came to be understood as a glaring example of the extreme over-sentencing of African Americans.
When he was not in court, Lumumba was agitating, as a civil rights and anti-apartheid activist, as a leading figure in the Republic of New Afrika, and as a co-founder of the National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America and the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement.
That's not the usual resume for the mayor of a major southern city.
But Chokwe Lumumba had no intention of becoming a usual mayor when he launched his bid last year for Jackson's top job. After a campaign in which the city councilman was outspent 4-1 and attacked as a militant, Lumumba defeated an incumbent mayor and a business-backed contender in the Democratic primary and then won more than 85 percent of the vote in the June, 2013, general election.
He took office not merely with the intent of managing Jackson but with the goal of transforming it. "People should take a note of Jackson, because we have suffered some of the worst kinds of abuses in history, but we're about to make some advances and some strides in the development of human rights and the protection of human rights that I think have not been seen in other parts of the country," he told Democracy Now! just days after his election.
For Lumumba, that meant building unprecedented coalitions that crossed lines of race, class, gender, ideology and politics. "Our revolution is for the better idea it's not just for the change in colors." he told The Jackson Free Press.
Lumumba wanted Jackson to create a "solidarity economy," with en emphasis on developing cooperatives and establishing models for local development and worker ownership.
"We have to make sure that economically we're free, and part of that is the whole idea of economic democracy," said the mayor, who explained in an interview shortly after his election:
We have to deal with more cooperative thinking and more involvement of people in the control of businesses, as opposed to just the big money changers, or the big CEOs and the big multinational corporations, the big capitalist corporations which generally control here in Mississippi. They are a reality.
And so it's not that we're going to throw them out of Mississippi. I don't think that's going to happen, but I do believe that we can develop ways of working to have Blacks and other - indeed, not just Blacks but other poor people, or people who are less endowed with great wealth - to participate in the economy on an equal basis.
Lumumba was building the coalitions, and gaining a striking level of support for his vision, when he died unxpectedly from heart failure at age 66.
Lumumba had run for the mayoralty as "a Fannie Lou Hamer Democrat" and promised to renew the small "d" democracy vision of Hamer's Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. True to his campaign slogan, "The People Must Decide," he sought to organize new social and economic networks (with a special emphasis on developing cooperatives) in Mississippi's capital city and boldly asked citizens to vote to raise their own taxes in order to repair the city's crumbling infrastructure. While most politicians avoid association with tax hikes, Lumumba campaigned across the city of 175,000 - announcing that "we can fix the problem" - and on January 14, 2014, the mayor won a 9-1 vote of confidence.
Celebrating that victory, Lumumba declared, "I want to just say that it's been a resounding victory here, and there's only one way to go -- that's up. We're going to do exactly what we said. We said at the very beginning that we were going to take infrastructure and revitalize infrastructure and transition infrastructure into economy."
The mayor's enthusiasm extended to his efforts to convince Mississippi's conservative legislature to support aid to Jackson. He created a sense that just about anything was possible in a city that embraced his activist agenda on human rights and economic justice issues.
"I have known Mayor Lumumba since 1974," said Congressman Bennie Thompson, D-Mississippi. "One of the reasons I was so public about my support for the mayor, was that I believed once people got to know the real Chokwe Lumumba they would find him to be an extremely bright, caring and humble individual. His election as mayor and very short term in office demonstrated exactly that."
Lumumba death, from heart failure, came as a shock. And a shocking loss for a city that had elected him just months earlier. Crowds gathered at Jackson's city hall to mourn that loss. "Words cannot do justice to the emotions we all feel right now. Our great captain has fallen. Our hearts are broken," said Hinds County (Jackson) Democratic Party chair Jacqueline Amos. "The legacy of Chokwe Lumumba must not be buried with the man."
Amos is so very right.
Cities are the places where radical reformers can still break the political mold and make real change, where the politics of concession and compromise can be replaced with the politics of people power and renewal. Chokwe Lumumba proved that, and the best way to honor his accomplishment is to elect more mayors who are as determined as he was to be transformative leaders.
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Chokwe Lumumba maintained a civil rights commitment that was rooted in the moment when his mother showed her eight-year-old son the Jet magazine photograph of a beaten Emmett Till in his open casket. The commitment was nurtured on the streets of Detroit, where Lumumba and his mother collected money to support the Southern Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the civil rights struggles of the early 1960s.
The mayor's death ended an epic journey that challenged conventions, upset the status quo and proved the potential of electoral politics to initiate radical change -- even in a conservative southern state.
As a young man, inspired by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr's struggle to address "infectious discrimination, racism and apartheid," and shocked into a deeper activism by King's assassination, Lumumba changed his name from Edwin Taliaferro--taking his new first name from an African tribe that had resisted slavery and his new last name from the Congolese independence leader Patrice Lumumba.
Chokwe Lumumba became a human rights lawyer "defending political prisoners people who are being prosecuted because of their political beliefs." His clients would eventually include former Black Panthers and rapper Tupac Shakur. His remarkable list of legal accomplishments included his key role in the 2010 decision of Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour to suspend the sentences of Jamie and Gladys Scott, Mississippi sisters who were released after serving 16 years of consecutive life sentences for an $11 robbery -- a punishment that came to be understood as a glaring example of the extreme over-sentencing of African Americans.
When he was not in court, Lumumba was agitating, as a civil rights and anti-apartheid activist, as a leading figure in the Republic of New Afrika, and as a co-founder of the National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America and the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement.
That's not the usual resume for the mayor of a major southern city.
But Chokwe Lumumba had no intention of becoming a usual mayor when he launched his bid last year for Jackson's top job. After a campaign in which the city councilman was outspent 4-1 and attacked as a militant, Lumumba defeated an incumbent mayor and a business-backed contender in the Democratic primary and then won more than 85 percent of the vote in the June, 2013, general election.
He took office not merely with the intent of managing Jackson but with the goal of transforming it. "People should take a note of Jackson, because we have suffered some of the worst kinds of abuses in history, but we're about to make some advances and some strides in the development of human rights and the protection of human rights that I think have not been seen in other parts of the country," he told Democracy Now! just days after his election.
For Lumumba, that meant building unprecedented coalitions that crossed lines of race, class, gender, ideology and politics. "Our revolution is for the better idea it's not just for the change in colors." he told The Jackson Free Press.
Lumumba wanted Jackson to create a "solidarity economy," with en emphasis on developing cooperatives and establishing models for local development and worker ownership.
"We have to make sure that economically we're free, and part of that is the whole idea of economic democracy," said the mayor, who explained in an interview shortly after his election:
We have to deal with more cooperative thinking and more involvement of people in the control of businesses, as opposed to just the big money changers, or the big CEOs and the big multinational corporations, the big capitalist corporations which generally control here in Mississippi. They are a reality.
And so it's not that we're going to throw them out of Mississippi. I don't think that's going to happen, but I do believe that we can develop ways of working to have Blacks and other - indeed, not just Blacks but other poor people, or people who are less endowed with great wealth - to participate in the economy on an equal basis.
Lumumba was building the coalitions, and gaining a striking level of support for his vision, when he died unxpectedly from heart failure at age 66.
Lumumba had run for the mayoralty as "a Fannie Lou Hamer Democrat" and promised to renew the small "d" democracy vision of Hamer's Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. True to his campaign slogan, "The People Must Decide," he sought to organize new social and economic networks (with a special emphasis on developing cooperatives) in Mississippi's capital city and boldly asked citizens to vote to raise their own taxes in order to repair the city's crumbling infrastructure. While most politicians avoid association with tax hikes, Lumumba campaigned across the city of 175,000 - announcing that "we can fix the problem" - and on January 14, 2014, the mayor won a 9-1 vote of confidence.
Celebrating that victory, Lumumba declared, "I want to just say that it's been a resounding victory here, and there's only one way to go -- that's up. We're going to do exactly what we said. We said at the very beginning that we were going to take infrastructure and revitalize infrastructure and transition infrastructure into economy."
The mayor's enthusiasm extended to his efforts to convince Mississippi's conservative legislature to support aid to Jackson. He created a sense that just about anything was possible in a city that embraced his activist agenda on human rights and economic justice issues.
"I have known Mayor Lumumba since 1974," said Congressman Bennie Thompson, D-Mississippi. "One of the reasons I was so public about my support for the mayor, was that I believed once people got to know the real Chokwe Lumumba they would find him to be an extremely bright, caring and humble individual. His election as mayor and very short term in office demonstrated exactly that."
Lumumba death, from heart failure, came as a shock. And a shocking loss for a city that had elected him just months earlier. Crowds gathered at Jackson's city hall to mourn that loss. "Words cannot do justice to the emotions we all feel right now. Our great captain has fallen. Our hearts are broken," said Hinds County (Jackson) Democratic Party chair Jacqueline Amos. "The legacy of Chokwe Lumumba must not be buried with the man."
Amos is so very right.
Cities are the places where radical reformers can still break the political mold and make real change, where the politics of concession and compromise can be replaced with the politics of people power and renewal. Chokwe Lumumba proved that, and the best way to honor his accomplishment is to elect more mayors who are as determined as he was to be transformative leaders.
Chokwe Lumumba maintained a civil rights commitment that was rooted in the moment when his mother showed her eight-year-old son the Jet magazine photograph of a beaten Emmett Till in his open casket. The commitment was nurtured on the streets of Detroit, where Lumumba and his mother collected money to support the Southern Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the civil rights struggles of the early 1960s.
The mayor's death ended an epic journey that challenged conventions, upset the status quo and proved the potential of electoral politics to initiate radical change -- even in a conservative southern state.
As a young man, inspired by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr's struggle to address "infectious discrimination, racism and apartheid," and shocked into a deeper activism by King's assassination, Lumumba changed his name from Edwin Taliaferro--taking his new first name from an African tribe that had resisted slavery and his new last name from the Congolese independence leader Patrice Lumumba.
Chokwe Lumumba became a human rights lawyer "defending political prisoners people who are being prosecuted because of their political beliefs." His clients would eventually include former Black Panthers and rapper Tupac Shakur. His remarkable list of legal accomplishments included his key role in the 2010 decision of Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour to suspend the sentences of Jamie and Gladys Scott, Mississippi sisters who were released after serving 16 years of consecutive life sentences for an $11 robbery -- a punishment that came to be understood as a glaring example of the extreme over-sentencing of African Americans.
When he was not in court, Lumumba was agitating, as a civil rights and anti-apartheid activist, as a leading figure in the Republic of New Afrika, and as a co-founder of the National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America and the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement.
That's not the usual resume for the mayor of a major southern city.
But Chokwe Lumumba had no intention of becoming a usual mayor when he launched his bid last year for Jackson's top job. After a campaign in which the city councilman was outspent 4-1 and attacked as a militant, Lumumba defeated an incumbent mayor and a business-backed contender in the Democratic primary and then won more than 85 percent of the vote in the June, 2013, general election.
He took office not merely with the intent of managing Jackson but with the goal of transforming it. "People should take a note of Jackson, because we have suffered some of the worst kinds of abuses in history, but we're about to make some advances and some strides in the development of human rights and the protection of human rights that I think have not been seen in other parts of the country," he told Democracy Now! just days after his election.
For Lumumba, that meant building unprecedented coalitions that crossed lines of race, class, gender, ideology and politics. "Our revolution is for the better idea it's not just for the change in colors." he told The Jackson Free Press.
Lumumba wanted Jackson to create a "solidarity economy," with en emphasis on developing cooperatives and establishing models for local development and worker ownership.
"We have to make sure that economically we're free, and part of that is the whole idea of economic democracy," said the mayor, who explained in an interview shortly after his election:
We have to deal with more cooperative thinking and more involvement of people in the control of businesses, as opposed to just the big money changers, or the big CEOs and the big multinational corporations, the big capitalist corporations which generally control here in Mississippi. They are a reality.
And so it's not that we're going to throw them out of Mississippi. I don't think that's going to happen, but I do believe that we can develop ways of working to have Blacks and other - indeed, not just Blacks but other poor people, or people who are less endowed with great wealth - to participate in the economy on an equal basis.
Lumumba was building the coalitions, and gaining a striking level of support for his vision, when he died unxpectedly from heart failure at age 66.
Lumumba had run for the mayoralty as "a Fannie Lou Hamer Democrat" and promised to renew the small "d" democracy vision of Hamer's Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. True to his campaign slogan, "The People Must Decide," he sought to organize new social and economic networks (with a special emphasis on developing cooperatives) in Mississippi's capital city and boldly asked citizens to vote to raise their own taxes in order to repair the city's crumbling infrastructure. While most politicians avoid association with tax hikes, Lumumba campaigned across the city of 175,000 - announcing that "we can fix the problem" - and on January 14, 2014, the mayor won a 9-1 vote of confidence.
Celebrating that victory, Lumumba declared, "I want to just say that it's been a resounding victory here, and there's only one way to go -- that's up. We're going to do exactly what we said. We said at the very beginning that we were going to take infrastructure and revitalize infrastructure and transition infrastructure into economy."
The mayor's enthusiasm extended to his efforts to convince Mississippi's conservative legislature to support aid to Jackson. He created a sense that just about anything was possible in a city that embraced his activist agenda on human rights and economic justice issues.
"I have known Mayor Lumumba since 1974," said Congressman Bennie Thompson, D-Mississippi. "One of the reasons I was so public about my support for the mayor, was that I believed once people got to know the real Chokwe Lumumba they would find him to be an extremely bright, caring and humble individual. His election as mayor and very short term in office demonstrated exactly that."
Lumumba death, from heart failure, came as a shock. And a shocking loss for a city that had elected him just months earlier. Crowds gathered at Jackson's city hall to mourn that loss. "Words cannot do justice to the emotions we all feel right now. Our great captain has fallen. Our hearts are broken," said Hinds County (Jackson) Democratic Party chair Jacqueline Amos. "The legacy of Chokwe Lumumba must not be buried with the man."
Amos is so very right.
Cities are the places where radical reformers can still break the political mold and make real change, where the politics of concession and compromise can be replaced with the politics of people power and renewal. Chokwe Lumumba proved that, and the best way to honor his accomplishment is to elect more mayors who are as determined as he was to be transformative leaders.
"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."