US Has Over 6,000 hospitals. Only 1,300 Are Private For-Profit Institution

America, Capitalism, COVID-19, Free Markets, Government, Healthcare

If you imagined America has a free market in medicine, read “Diagnosis: opaque: Donald Trump wants hospitals to be more upfront about prices”:

The country has over 6,000 hospitals. Only 1,300 or so are private for-profit institutions; the rest are non-profit or government-run. The lack of an overt profit motive has done little to rein in prices, however. Hospital costs have risen at an annual rate of close to 5%, compared with below 1% for drug prices. … Nor has a charitable mission dampened the ambition of bosses at big hospital chains; seven-figure salaries are not unheard of at those with revenues exceeding $500m a year. They have also been on an acquisition binge. The number of deals has jumped from around 55 a year between 2002 and 2009 to 90 or more these days. Since 2018 non-profit hospitals have been the acquirers in three-quarters of the transactions.

How do government-run or subsidized hospitals engage in the capitalistic act of mergers?  They do so on the backs of taxpayers. Profits are privatized; losses are socialized. This is the stuff of cronyism.

Free market medicine we do not have. Before Coronavirus, Trump was looking to reform the nation’s hospitals.

MORE:

“Diagnosis: opaque: Donald Trump wants hospitals to be more upfront about prices”

* Image courtesy The Economist.

Happy, Homogeneous Hungary

Christian Right, Christianity, EU, Europe, Family, Globalism, IMMIGRATION, Multiculturalism, Race, Racism, The West

Happy Hungary: CBS’s flagship program, 60 Minutes, has just assailed Hungary for its closed border, pro-Western, Christian, Hungarian-families-first policies. Hungarians looked as happy as they are homogeneous. Can’t have that!

Hungarians, incidentally, have only 131 Corona cases (6 deaths). This (as this writer, at least,  hypothesizes) is due to a more stable population and fewer pockets of people living, say, with one foot in Wuhan; the other in the West.

And it’s not just that “enlightened” western media object to “Hungary exercising its right to self-determination.” No. The media treat the sight of fruitful, happy whites as they would an aberration, a plague. Freud would have called this western attitude Thanatos: “the personification of death.” This mindset is pathological, for Hungarians look beautiful, happy and whole.

The same government that strenuously tries to boost population, also goes to extraordinary lengths to keep non-Hungarians out. In 2015, hundreds of thousands of refugees and migrants, most from the Middle East, passed through Hungary. They were told they were not welcome to stay.

“We must state that we do not want to be diverse and do not want to be mixed,” Orban said in a speech last year. “We do not want our color, traditions and national culture to be mixed with those of others. We do not want to be a diverse country.” …

 

Prime Minister Orban’s motto:

“‘Procreation, not immigration.’ He did what President Trump promised to do [and didn’t]. In 2015, Orban slammed Hungary’s gates shut, building, essentially, a border wall, a $500 million fence 180 miles long on the southern border with Serbia.”

“This is about preserving, we keep hearing, ‘European values,'” Wertheim said to Toroczkai. “What does that mean?”
“For me, the– the European culture, the– the European values are the classical music. Mozart. Beethoven. Tchaikovsky,” Toroczkai said.

…Secretary of State Katalin Novak … says the plan is entirely consistent with Hungarian values. “We speak about not only preserving Western civilization, we also, to say it openly, that Christian culture we would like to preserve,” Novak said.

“Christian culture?” Wertheim asked.

“Yeah, that’s the way of life in Europe, in Hungary, that we have a Christian way of life,” Novak said.

‘Keep Hungary Hungarian,’ that’s true. We say that.”

MORE of CBS’s drip-drip poison: “Subsidies for minivans: Hungarian government paying citizens to start families, but only the ‘right’ kinds of families. A program in Hungary is offering cash to couples for having kids, but the reasoning for it echoes some of Europe’s darkest chapters. Jon Wertheim reports on the anti-immigrant motivation to “keep Hungary Hungarian.”

There Is More Cronyism Than Capitalism In Corporate America (Boeing? Oink, Oink)

America, Business, Capitalism, Economy, Free Markets, Globalism, Labor, Trade

In “Why Tax Breaks Won’t Stop High-Tech, H-1B Human Trafficking,” I explained how, “The H-1B visa racket,” like so much of the rent-seeking global, corporate America does, “is … a taxpayer-subsidized, grant of government privilege. Duly, profits remain private property. The costs of accommodating an annual human influx are socialized, borne by the bewildered [American] community.”

the corporations that hog H-1Bs act like incorrigibly corrupt rent seekers. Not only do they get to replace the American worker, but they get to do so at his expense.

Here’s how:

Globally, a series of sordid liaisons ensures that American workers are left high and dry. Through the programs of the International Trade Administration, the Export-Import Bank, the Overseas Private Investment Corporation, the International Monetary Fund, and other oink-operations, the taxpaying American worker is forced to subsidize and underwrite the investment risks of the very corporations that have given him the boot.

Domestically, the fascistic partnership with the State amounts to a subsidy to business at the expense of the taxpayer. See, corporations in our democratic welfare state externalize their employment costs onto the taxpayers.

MORE in “Why Tax Breaks Won’t Stop High-Tech, H-1B Human Trafficking.

Now, via Washington Examiner’s “When foreign airlines go under, US taxpayers could be stuck with the bill” comes quite a positive description of the sordid liaisons and transactions on the backs of American taxpayers:

Subsidizing Boeing jets has generally been the Ex-Im Bank’s main activity. Typically, about 40% of all its financing supports Boeing exports. That’s why the agency has earned the nickname “Boeing’s Bank.”
As a result, airlines in China, Turkey, Bangladesh, Canada, Mexico, and all over the world have benefited from U.S. taxpayer-backed financing to buy Boeing jets in recent years. Many of them still owe their lenders, meaning the U.S. taxpayer is still exposed via the Ex-Im Bank. There’s a decent chance some of those foreign airlines will default on some debt payments. That could result in the Ex-Im Bank having to make the creditors whole.

There is more cronyism than Capitalism in the operation of the giants of corporate America.

UPDATE:  Just desserts.

Living With One Foot In Wuhan, The Other In The West

Ann Coulter, China, Conservatism, Globalism, IMMIGRATION, Labor, libertarianism, Nationalism

Writes Michelle Malkin:

Just learned that OpenBordersInc tool Charles Sauer is not only a DACA amnesty promoter, but also wants more EB-5 visas for wealthy Chinese, which Lindsey Graham and Jared Kushner are trying to expand as part of a coronovirus rescue package. Expose AMERICALAST and OpenBordersInc.

Ms. Malkin is referring to “Don’t let populism push people out of the country” by Charles Sauer, a very dull piece full of old bromides and shibboleths, such as that the cessation of immigration is synonymous with stagnation.

As I am beginning to see it, America First and more immigration from WuFlu China are mutually exclusive!

Expanded immigration from China means very many more people living with one foot in Wuhan, the other in Washington State and beyond.

Ann Coulter put it succinctly in “Cheap TVs, Expensive FLU”:

Thanks to “globalism” — i.e., cheap goods from China — we’ve gotten many wondrous things, for example:

— Toothpaste on American shelves made with a poison found in antifreeze.

— Toxic Chinese drywall installed in about 100,000 U.S. homes, emitting noxious fumes that destroyed electrical wiring and metal fixtures and sickened homeowners. Replacement of the drywall, pipes and wiring cost Americans billions of dollars.

— Hundreds, possibly thousands, of American dogs killed by melamine-laced Chinese dog food in 2007.

— The loss of about 200,000 beautiful maple trees lining the streets of small New England towns, eaten by Asian long-horned beetles that arrived on Chinese cargo ships in 1996. The U.S. taxpayer spends hundreds of millions of dollars to eradicate the repeated outbreaks that continue to this day, despite promises from the Chinese to do better.

— Viral pandemics — H1N1 (from China), bird flu (from China), SARS (from China) and now the Wuhan virus (from China).

Is it really worth paying $3 for a T-shirt at Walmart, rather than $9? The precise reason Chinese goods are so cheap is that they skip the crucial quality-control step.