Understanding & Fighting Investor Ownership of Health Care

September 20, 2023

Summary: Private for-profit ownership of health care is undermining the health care mission, diverting care resources to shareholder bank accounts. Single payer financing is not enough … we need to resist the corporate takeover. Two important webinars are coming up NEXT WEEK. Listen in, and get involved.

Medicare for All Is Not Enough
The Nation
March 31, 2022
By David U. Himmelstein, Steffie Woolhandler, Adam Gaffney, Don McCanne, John Geyman
covered in HJM here

Dr. Glaucomflecken videos (2 min each)
30 Days of US Healthcare: United Healthcare For All
September 20, 2023

30 Days of US Healthcare: Private Equity Visits Rural Medicine
September 19, 2023

30 Days of US Healthcare: Physician Owned Hospitals
September 9, 2023

Comment by: Don McCanne

Single payer financing meets the goal of insuring everyone, funded equitably through progressive taxation. However, it is incapable of controlling the dictates of private ownership with a primary mission of increasing private wealth as opposed to providing the public service of health care for all. Private equity is acquiring not only facilities but also the health care professional groups staffing these facilities. Our article in The Nation summarizes these terrible trends, and Dr. Glaucomflecken distills the problems with his astringent humor. The public service model of single payer cannot work in a system designed to pump up the coffers of billionaires.

Two zoom webinars NEXT WEEK address the hazards of private ownership in health care:

1) The Lancet Webinars: Public policy and health in the USA miniseries: should investors own healthcare?
Tuesday September 26, 2023 2 pm EDT / 11 am PDT
Register here

Four US experts will examine the implications of growing investor ownership of physicians’ practices, hospitals, and other health services in the US, and their consolidation into giant corporate enterprises that dominate insurance and care delivery in many regions of the US. Panelists are luminaries Don Berwick, Rosemary Batt, Steffie Woolhandler, and Claudia Fegan.

2) Health Affairs:  Briefing: How the Ownership and Structure of Health Care Entities Affect Clinicians & Patients
Wednesday September 27, 2023 2 pm EDT / 11 am PDT
Register here

WATCH THE ZOOM MEETINGS AND THEN WORK TOGETHER TO FIGHT THIS PROCESS. WE HAVE TO DO IT. SINGLE PAYER WILL GO NOWHERE IF WE DO NOT ADDRESS THE OWNERSHIP HARM CAUSED BY THE BILLIONAIRES. WE HAVE TO REBUILD THE SYSTEM!

In solidarity and with love,

Don