The murder of the UnitedHealth CEO by a guy who underwent spinal fusion surgery for debilitating pain has unleashed a furious debate about US health care, most of it dumb
Thankfully I found a whistleblower suit filed by a surgeon UHC hired to deny spinal fusion surgery coverage.. But first: the predictable chorus of obtuse propagandists saying it's vulgar to villainize insurers which after all "barely generate profits", reminds me of a book I've found invaluable for demystifying this shit.
The author was a Mafia reporter. US health care is a crime scene

You already know a company called RealPage orchestrated a vast 15-year conspiracy to eternally inflate American rents.
But it gets worse: prospect.org/infrastructure… RealPage pretends to sell "algorithms" but a former exec says its software is really a "bastardization" designed to do one thing only: remove human judgment/logic/decency from the process of determining rent prices & raise them "hella way too high"

Since getting Covid I've had frequent bouts of what feels like "worst hangover of all time."
Last month a neurologist told me he'd learned at an "NIH panel" that "Long Covid is psychological."
Somehow, NIH spent $1.2 billion arriving at this conclusion. prospect.org/health/2024-06… .@thesicktimes FOIA-d docs to explain how the NIH Long Covid project spent so much achieving so little of value to folks w/ LC, which Fauci himself in 2020 noted is suspiciously similar to ME/CFS aka "chronic fatigue syndrome"
TLDR: they didn't hire anyone with ME/CFS expertise

Would Boeing murder a whistleblower? Before this month I'd have said it depends. I didn't think Boeing would kill a middle manager who never worked on the 737 Max & left in 2017.

What surprised me was how many more informed observers felt Boeing...might
prospect.org/infrastructure… "I don't think one can be cynical enough when it comes to these guys," said a longtime exec.

He told me to open Maps & find the airport 180 miles east of the 737 factory where Boeing stores "finished" jets that are too fucked to deliver. "The engines alone are worth billions."

holy shit: a childhood friend of dead Boeing whistleblower Swampy Barnett said he told her straight up: "If anything happens to me, it's not suicide." This echoes what his lawyer & brother told me for my piece yesterday.
I was shocked: Boeing has dozens of whistleblowers; whistleblowing is thankless/isolating/self-destructive stuff; Swampy didn't even work on the 737 Max. But... prospect.org/justice/2024-0…

This shocks even me: Rite Aid just clawed back already-paid severance payments from the bank accounts of thousands of laid-off workers, literally the same day Bloomberg reported its CEO is slated to receive $20 MILLION when the co emerges from Chap 11.



Naturally, Kirkland & Ellis & Alvarez & Marsal made out okay: they've billed the bankrupt dumpster fire pharmacy chain $50 million so far news.bloomberglaw.com/antitrust/rite…

The billionaire class is clamping down on "antisemitism"
They say it runs so rampant in elite schools they must BDS the Ivy League
UPenn grad Marc Rowan is leading the crusade. In an open letter to rich alums, he invoked "morals"/"morality" 10 times
prospect.org/power/2023-10-… But Marc Rowan is CEO & cofounder of one of the world's most outlandishly immoral institutions, Apollo Global Management, an industrial-scale looter that exploits access to cheap $$ to seize control of rural hospitals & factories, mines & mills and & supermarkets, & suck them dry

last week longtime Amazon #2 Dave Clark was publicly fired from his new job.
Clark is 1 of the great sociopaths of postmodern commerce, a productivity algorithm in human form
As big an asshole as Jack Welch, minus the charm.
Here's Dave in happier times prospect.org/power/2023-09-…
There is perhaps no purer distillation than Dave Clark of the harms unregulated monopolies perpetrate upon the economy and society.
As head of Amazon logistics, he spent $61 billion in a single year on planes, ships & trucks, building out a logistics network no one could rival

Earlier this month an Illinois physician learned her ER as getting a new boss. He called himself "Doctor George." And he was *deeply* unhappy with her failure to do Medicare fraud.

A thread on the chaotic collapse of a(nother) private equity ER operator prospect.org/health/2023-07… American Physician Partners was like 100 other PE medical rollups. It used debt to swallow small practices in a specialty, emergency med, promising investors it would make the $ back by billing more & paying docs less, thanks to an "oversupply" of ER docs levernews.com/private-equity…

Days like this it is hard not to think of the little town in the Missouri panhandle with America's dirtiest air. In New Madrid, the median AQI is 131, thanks to an aluminum smelter where some smokestacks are just 50 feet high...

-a private equity story-
reuters.com/article/us-usa… I don't know why the smokestacks are so low. The plant was built in the 1970s in "compliance" with the Clean Air Act.

By locating in a remote town with unusually *clean* air, owners were allowed to emit substantially *more* pollution than the industry standard.

This month a busy hospital shut down in Texas
Pondered the National Review:
If Health Care Is So Expensive, Why Do Hospitals Close?
The explanation, @nro warned, was "not sexy"
TLDR—it's poor people. How sick they all are, etc

But what if the problem is actually..rich people?🧵





Herewith, the saga of Medical Properties Trust, the company that bought the now-closed Texas Vista hospital from a PE firm & leased it to PE-owned Steward Health in 2017.

2 weeks later, a journalist investigating a Steward deal in Malta was murdered. prospect.org/health/2023-05…

This is the Friar Professional Building of Van Nuys, headquarters of no fewer than 161 of Los Angeles's 1,841 licensed hospice agencies.
Last year Medicare sent roughly $23 billion to entities like these, ostensibly to care for terminally ill seniors. prospect.org/health/2023-04… Barriers to entry aren't high: in CA it just takes $3K, the license # of some doctor no one will even call to check, and a business address, which Friar sells for $25/mo

Rustle up the SSNs of some seniors & you too can start billing CMS between $203 and $1463 per patient per DAY

This is a deep dive on Signature, the "other" bank failure of March 2023. Barney Frank & the WSJ editorial board have called it an "Execution"

Appropriately, Signature's origins date back to an assassination.

The year was 1999, dateline Monte Carlo prospect.org/economy/2023-0… 1. Edmond Safra was a banking legend & 1 of the world's richest men. Born in Beirut (famliy financed the Ottoman Empire caravan trade) & raised in Brazil, he jetsetted between NY, Geneva, Fr. Riviera & a Monaco compound built to withstand nuclear war. For when shit got too real

Good afternoon music fans! In honor of all the chumps over 40 camping out in online Hell to score concert tickets today, a thread on all the times your (least?) favorite musician crossed paths with the omnipotent empire known as Ticketmaster/Live Nation. What the "Ticket Masters" understood from the start was the power of installing themselves as gatekeepers btwn rock stars & fans.

(This story *probably* starts with the CIA money launderer who bilked Creedence Clearwater Revival in the 70s and bought Ticketmaster in 1981, but..)

Still wrapping my mind around the news that supermarket behemoths Albertsons & Kroger are planning to merge. If this deal goes through we should all just go Amish.

A thread about how private equity made:
-food deserts
-food hyperinflation
-$$$$ Some context: as we know from yesterday's CPI # the gap between the 13% inflation inflicted by grocery stores vs 8.5% imposed by restaurants is a staggering 4.5 points.

That is 100% because restuarants are a competitive business, and supermarkets are a depraved racket

Maybe you've heard Sysco @Teamsters are on strike in 3 cities. But unless you work in a commercial kitchen, you probably don't know what Sysco even is, or why so many chefs & small restaurants are *rooting* for the strikers. Goldman Sachs-spawned Sysco & PE-backed US Foods are tyrants of the restaurant supply cartel. Their service is often shockingly bad.
But they're Kings of M&A. Sysco's acquired more than 150 rivals. Chefs have nightmares about USF swallowing their purveyors economicliberties.us/press-release/…

I cannot tell you why there's a tampon shortage.
But last year Procter & Gamble
-controlled 50% of the US tampon market
-generated $17.8 billion operating profit
-spent $13.5B on stock buybacks
-spent $8.4B on dividends
-ran out of cash before they paid the cotton guy? But 4 years ago Kimberly Clark, whose Kotex has 20% tampon share, fired 5500 workers bc "pricing pressure" had limited its 2017 op profit to just $3.3B
(K-C's 19% op margin=2x S&P 500 avg)

No pricing complaints in their last earnings call, though...

ladies and gentlemen, the Democrats! Porter's $174K salary=abt125% the DC MHI
DC never suffered deindustrialization
IT doesnt participate in recessions
There's clean public transit & free preK3
Financed by legalized bribery
Which is why a big bronze mogul baby who never loaded a dishwasher can be "populist" here:

So, the origin of the baby formula pocalypse was Abbott management's refusal to repair dilapidated and failure-prone drying machines turning the plant into proverbial petri dishes for cronobacter, because...

They needed that $5.73 billion for stock buybacks, obvs Parallels with the Boeing murders are too numerous to list but as u can imagine
-Total breakdown in basic quality control protocols
-Rampant record falsification
-Fired whistleblowers
-Culture of insouciance re duping regulators who
-did not exactly display a sense of urgency

"Physician labor activism" has never been a thing in this country. I have a story up today on @LeverNews about why that is changing.

Hint: rhymes with "Cryvit Sequity"
levernews.com/out-of-the-er-… 1/
The story follows the docs of a busy Level 1 Trauma Center where USACS, an Apollo-backed ER practice rollup, recently bought the practice

Most ER docs now work for loathed PE-backed megapractices, but USACS was the first to pay *doctors* $21 AN HOUR sullivanlegal.us/denver-hospita…

3 days ago this man performed a 🔥 guitar solo at a deserted strip mall to draw attention to the atrocities committed by an outfit called Western Dental. He got FOUR MILLION views, because even the algorithm believes private equity in health care is bad.

https://twitter.com/ferngalvn/status/1502747249956122624

Western Dental is owned by New Mountain Capital, a "socially responsible" PE firm with $30 billion under mgt founded by a former protege of the late Teddy Forstmann, renowned as the "nicest" & most "ethical" Milken-era corporate raider. A low bar, then & now