Hoovering up the cash
I think I might have shown this before. It ' s spending on " healthcare, " i.e. medical services and goods in the U.S., as a percent of GDP. It leveled off for a while after passage of the ACA, but it ' s going back up: All that moolah isn ' t buying us better health though. We ' re spending twice as much as comparable countries and getting the least for it: Naturally, all that cash is going mostly to one place: capitalists.Recent
decades have seen one overarching trend: consolidation of the medical industry into fewer and larger entities.•Horizontal
consolidation: similar institutions merge into chains. Hospitals, primary care
practices, nursing homes, dialysis clinics, ambulatory surgery centers . . .•Vertical
consolidation: various kinds of facilities are brought into the same firm,e.g.
hospital chains buying physician practices or nursing homes, or private equity
firms buying up medical facilities.•Large
health insurers and private equity firms have also been buying physician
practices as an investment. Optum Health, a subsidiary of the giant
conglomerate UnitedHealth Group, now employs 8.4% of all practicing physicians
in the U.S. – 90,000.•According
to an analysis in The Economist, 45% of medical spending in the U.S. goes to
just nine firms: insurers, drug distributors and pharmacy benefit managers.•UnitedHealth
had revenues of $324 billion in 2022, second only to Walmart, and is now
America ’s 12th most valuable company. CVS health
has ¼ ...
Source: Stayin' Alive - Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
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