A right-wing religious PAC just received a $1.6 billion donation, and the medical-industrial complex will now be a whole lot harder to fight.

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By:

Dave Kingsley

Leonard Leo and the Marble Freedom Trust

As head of the Federalist Society, Leonard Leo has had a major role in picking Catholic right-wing Supreme Court justices such as Alito, Roberts, Kavanaugh, and Barrett.  Leo is himself a fanatic, right-wing, Catholic who has no respect for the separation of church and state.  This brand of Catholicism works well with the Christian Nationalist Movement[1] that cuts across most fanatical, fundamentalist, Protestant sects.  

Although the Federalist Society is an organization for the promotion of legal conservatism and includes a variety of far-right believers in a sort of faux libertarianism and assorted other rightwing philosophies, Leo has locked in the Notre Dame law school theocrats as a powerhouse in the grooming and promotion of suitable candidates for future government legal positions and jurists.

Barre Seid, a Chicago industrialist, and ardent libertarian, has donated his entire company – Tripp Lite – to the Marble Freedom Trust, a 501(c)(4) political entity controlled by Leonard Leo.  The Marble Freedom Trust sold the company to the Eaton Corporation for $1.6 billion. This intersection of radical, libertarian, industrialists and the assortment of theocratic movements does not bode well for those of us who are working to deindustrialize healthcare, and other government functions.  The religious right shares many values of super-rich, self-proclaimed libertarians such as the Koch brothers. They believe that wealthy industrialists are godly insofar as they either share or are willing to tolerate the Christian Nationalist value system.

History has taught us that major religious institutions and industrialists are willing to accommodate regimes and politicians that serve their interests no matter how corrupt, anti-democratic, and debasing to the public interest.  The Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United has already placed corporate political activities in a protective bubble.  We can look for corporations threatened with movements for reform to look to the current lopsided court and politicians on the make to protect their interests.

Therefore, Marble Freedom Trust money will be directed toward politicians and court actions that place property over people, profit over health, capital over labor, and the super-rich over the broad mass of citizens.  This will make changing a life-shorting, inhumane nursing home system far more difficult.  Gouging the public for life-saving medications and denial of medical care to the uninsured will be difficult to end. Let’s face it, we cannot ignore politics in our quest for social justice. 

[1] Christian Nationalism has been studied and reported on by journalist Katherine Stewart.  In her book, The Power Worshippers, she discusses this movement’s belief that the U.S. is a Christian Nation, and that the U.S. should be ruled in accordance with what they consider “Christian values.”  The values they endorse include are anti-gay, anti-democratic, pro-super wealthy, and freedom from government, except when they want to leverage government for imposing their radical beliefs on the rest of society.

The “medical industrial complex” is not capitalism, so let’s change the narrative.

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By:

Dave Kingsley

Genuine Capitalist Enterprises are Not Operating in Anti-Competitive, Government Rigged, Systems.

As a proponent of capitalism, I resent the U.S. privatized, government-funded, health care system and the implication that it is a suitable representative of a capitalist system.  It is not.  The system of nursing homes, hospitals, and clinics through which patients pass for care is a financialized[1], corrupt, rigged, system.  Furthermore, some services important to society should not be industrialized under the farcical notion that return on capital will drive quality care.

Reformers have failed to create a narrative to defeat the financiers’ mantra that privatizing appropriate government services will increase quality and productivity.  History has taught us a very clear lesson:  industrialization and privatization of medical care and a host of other government services are unproductive and lead to excess extraction of capital, lower productivity, and reduction of innovation and reinvestment.

You Can’t Shame the Shameless

There is an unfounded belief that exposing bad operators in sensational mainstream media articles will force a change for the better in nursing homes and hospitals.  The misguided view that the medical-industrial complex will be moved by horror stories reminds me of an old T-Shirt in my closet with the following silkscreened on it: “We Don’t Care, We Don’t Have to Care, We’re EXXON.”  You could substitute the words medical-industrial complex, The American Health Care Association (AHCA), Ensign Group,” Welltower Corporation, Centene, United Health, and thousands of other corporate associations and entities for EXXON on such a T-Shirt.

Nursing home and hospital corporations don’t care about the shaming they deserve because politicians in federal and state legislatures have their backs.  Furthermore, they have captured the agencies charged with regulating them.  The Center for Medicare & Medicaid Services, and 50 state agencies are dominated by the industry and their well-financed lobbying organizations (not to mention the FDA, the FTC, the CFTC, etc.).  You can shame private equity as a business model, scurrilous operators, low wages/salaries, understaffing, and other outrageous practices, but financiers in the healthcare business are, for the most part, shameless. 

For at least a decade, I have been urging advocates to form a narrative and political strategy.  Playing rope, a dope with an industry that has a very well devised, effective, and well-funded narrative will change nothing.  The nursing home industry has a narrative based on falsehoods, which are comprised of frames related to the hardships endured by noble businessmen and investors.  Frames in which the industry purports to be suffering from low Medicare/Medicaid reimbursement, and low net income (profits) are blatantly false and misleading.  Regardless of how unbelievable the frames comprising industry propaganda, they are never seriously challenged by the constellation of nonprofit and government entities representing the elderly.  Furthermore, do-gooder commissions charged with studies of nursing homes, hospitals, and other health care subsystems generally whitewash and paper over the unethical, inhumane, and anti-democratic nature of the entire medical-industrial complex.[2]

Let’s Get Technical

I propose that advocates create frames that can be integrated into and support this narrative: “The privatized U.S. healthcare system is not fair, capitalistic, or ethical.”  Frames accusing industrialists of manipulation of markets, financial machinations, pay offs/bribes to legislators, and covering up corruption through well-funded lobbying entities such as the AHCA (nursing home lobby) are necessary but risky for professionals who want to go along to get along.

Industry moguls and their minions in government know from 70 years of history that their propagandistic efforts work well. They have been able to convince the public that privatized, for profit, services are better than non-profit and government services.  This mantra has gained traction and is embedded deeply in the American zeitgeist.  It will take a concerted effort across a broad array of nonprofit advocacy organizations to destroy a narrative based on industry lies and complex financial maneuvers.

However, before advocates can suitably frame messages for the media and legislators, a considerable amount of research, data collection, and analysis must be undertaken.  Data and evidence related to “rent seeking,”[3] “net operating income,” and “cash flow,” is necessary for debunking the “low net,” “thin margins,” and other hardship frames of the industry.  The nursing home system must be unraveled and explained as a network of capital flows from taxpayers and other sources through Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs), private equity firms, LLCs/LLPs, and C-Corporations.

It is necessary to show how excessive capital flows through nursing homes and hospitals to investors and executives.  REITs have been existing under the radar and never discussed at legislative hearings (See my blog post: “Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs) are Big Players in the Nursing Home Industry:  That Should Concern All of Us” February 13, 2021).  We must recognize how the entry of private equity and REITs around 2000 literally transformed the industry.

Advocacy research must include data from cost reports submitted by facilities to CMS and state agencies.  Falsehoods in these reports are pervasive.  Nevertheless, it is important to organize the data to make a case and support our frames pertaining to corruption and excessive extraction of capital at the expense of care.

We Are on It!

A team of people across the U.S. have come together to initiate solid, evidence-based, research.  With some help from the LTCCC and a lot of volunteer work, a group of us have been organizing data from cost reports and digging into financial machinations, ownership, and the flow of capital from various sources (including taxpayers) to investors, executives, and family wealth. 

We want to direct attention to more than horrendous examples of nursing home abuse and neglect.  The industry justifies poor care with a well-honed, richly funded, propaganda campaign. We should not respond to their “woe is me pleas for increased funding.”  Rather we should follow the money and make the trail available to legislators and journalists that we know will utilize it (think Senator Elizabeth Warren).  I don’t want to engage them in their claim that investors in the nursing home industry are suffering.  My only response to that is investors are not stupid.  If returns were no good in public-funded, skilled nursing care, investors would be investing somewhere else. 

[1] By labeling the system “financialized,” I mean that financial maneuvering for extracting cash takes precedence over increased productivity and quality of services.  Shareholder value is the primary mission of most healthcare private corporations.  Stakeholders are of secondary importance.  Often stakeholders suffer for the sake of enhancing and protecting shareholders’ interests.

[2] While COVID was surging in the Spring of 2020, CMS convened an “independent” commission the management of which was outsourced to the Mitre Corporation.  The report of this commission was a whitewash and papered over general neglect by the nursing home industry which resulted in 200,000 patient and employee deaths.  Contrary to suggesting accountability for lack of infection control and no preparation for a pandemic that scientists had been warning about for decades, the final report recommended more financial assistance for the industry.  Recently, a commission under the auspices of the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) in operation for a number of years entitled “National Imperative to Improve Nursing Home Quality” issued a report of their work. This commission tiptoed around the corruption, deceit, and excessive extraction of capital at the expense of quality care.

[3] “Rent seeking” has evolved in the field of economics to describe corporate efforts to extract wealth without a correlative increase in the production of goods and services.  The nursing home, finance, real estate, lobby is constantly hectoring legislators for an increase in reimbursement without any real, scientific, evidence that the cash flow and return on their investment is inadequate.

Nursing Home History as Pablum:  Creating a Comfortable Reality for the Powerful

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By:

Dave Kingsley

A commission to study the nursing home system, conducted under the auspices of the National Academies, of Science, Engineering, & Medicine (NASEM), recently released its report entitled The National Imperative to Improve Nursing Home Quality: Honoring Our Commitment to Residents, Families, and Staff.[1] The report included a very brief history of the nursing home system – a 400-year history reduced to a couple of pages.  Furthermore, it is a history that will not upset officials, proprietors, investors, executives, politicians, and others who are benefitting from the status quo. 

Basically, the commission is feeding the public historical pablum.  Left out of the multi-century account are such salient features as ongoing and intensifying financialization, and pivot points such as the 1950s-60s’ development and codification of “the medically indigent,” the role of states’ rights, and the influence of racist, segregationists.  Also excised were many significant changes of 1980s-90s such the transformation of macroeconomic and corporate philosophy from managerial capitalism into what is known as “agency theory,” – basically meaning that shareholder value is not just the highest ethic of capitalist management but the only ethic.

Between the late 1990s and early 2000s, capital markets and tax codes were conducive for the entry of real estate investment trusts (REITs), private equity (PE), and other corporate legal structures (e.g., limited liability companies or LLCs) into the senior housing market.  Large pools of capital had been accumulating through pension, college endowment, sovereign wealth, and insurance funds that needed to flow into businesses that would provide desired yields and return on investment.  These funds are managed by institutional investors such as Vanguard and BlackRock.  The number and size of publicly listed companies have grown considerably over the past two decades as REITs have expanded their power and financial dominance in the senior housing market.  To ignore these players in the industry is to ignore the proverbial 800-pound gorilla in the room.

These changes have been accompanied by massive investments of cash into political campaigns and politicians’ coffers by PACs, Corporations, and lobbying firms representing the medical-industrial complex, Wall Street, and real estate.  What worthwhile history would tiptoe around the corruption wrought by money in politics?

It is easy to become known as a radical and marginalized. Taking a hardnosed stand regarding the truth is an annoyance.  History is written from a “point of view” of the powerful and their version of events. They choose the people, places, and things to include and exclude.  Challenging those points of view will typically evoke hostility.  This is currently noticeable in the backlash to “critical race theory.”  African Americans would benefit greatly from a factually accurate history of race in America, which would facilitate an honest look at institutional racism still pervasive in the United States – including in the nursing home system. It would also be helpful to the elderly to have a movement that could be called critical elder theory – perhaps CET would be an appropriate acronym.

Unfortunately, humans are beset with psychological defense mechanisms that serve the avoidance of truth and lend support to the creation of a comfortable reality.  There are many defense mechanisms recognized by psychoanalysts.  However, four main defenses in history: denial, rationalization, repression, and fantasy are essential for understanding how official bodies such as commissions paper over reality and prevent real change. 

Fantasy is seeing the world not as it is but as the way we would like it to be.  No American wants to think that the elderly, as humans, are only worth what the treatment in a typical nursing home would suggest.  We believe we are better than that.  Our creed does not permit widespread shortening of life and suffering because of financial considerations.  Somehow the incongruence between our creeds and our deeds must be reconciled.  So, we retreat into a fantasy world in which medically fragile and frail elderly and disabled persons are living in as system with a few tweaks can be fully staffed and made into a “home-like culture” (a vague term if ever there was one).

Fantasies can only be maintained through denial of reality (out of sight-out of mind), repression (just don’t think about it), and rationalization (Medicaid reimbursement is too low).  Human nature being what it is, these defenses operate mostly at a subconscious level. 

Window dressing called “home culture” as it has been conceived and implemented thus far will not substantively change the structure and function of the nursing home system as it has evolved.  However, it will assuage our consciences.

[1] National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine 2022. The National

Imperative to Improve Nursing Home Quality: Honoring Our Commitment to

Residents, Families, and Staff. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press.

https://doi.org/10.17226/26526

What Has Reaganomics Wrought?

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By:

Dave Kingsley

“In the Age of Show Business, Public Discourse Has Become Dangerous Nonsense” Neil Postman in Amusing Ourselves to Death

Shareholder Value is the Only Value:  Even the Taxpayer Funded
Life & Death Care in the Healthcare System Has been Reduced to a Matter of
Return on Investment

Welltower, Inc. – one of the major players in the senior living industry – states in its annual report to the Securities and Exchange Commission that the company’s primary goal is to “protect and enhance shareholder value.”  Although Welltower is a dominant force in the taxpayer funded, skilled nursing and long-term care system, nothing is mentioned in company financial reports about a duty to provide ethical medical care to patients.

I consider these nursing home corporations to be no less evil than corporations in the fossil fuel industry, tobacco industry, and the assault weapons industry.  Like big oil, big tobacco, and big firearms, they value people only as consumers with little to no human worth other than parting with their money for the benefit of investors.

Unlike the tobacco, fossil fuel, and gun industries, nursing home corporations earning extraordinary returns from taxpayer funded medical care are excused for their pervasive patient neglect and abuse by carefully selected members – often naïve academics or industry shills – of various commissions (e.g., the recent National Academy of Sciences and the COVID-related Mitre Corporation Commissions).  Without any empirical, scientific, justification, the industry’s propagandistic claims about skimpy Medicaid reimbursement are taken at face value in the media and generally by the public.  The industry has a richly funded a very effective PR machine.

Unquestioned misinformation – whether intentional or unintentional – is creating a crisis in American governance and the well-being of residents.  The anti-vax, anti-science, assault on the public health system during this era of COVID has long been in the making.  What has become known as proofiness (or truthiness) has polluted public discourse.  I have spent untold hours collecting, organizing and analyzing corporate financial reports submitted by nursing home corporations to state and federal agencies.  Much of it is fraudulent, much of it is financial machination, and much of it is laughably ridiculous, but hardly any of it is seriously questioned. So, deadly conditions in nursing homes continue unabated.

“Nihilism, the devaluation of the highest values of Western culture.”  Ashley Woodward in Understanding Nietzscheanism. 

Ronald Reagan Propelled a Destructive Economic & Social Philosophy Forward Through Government Policy:  Trumpism is the Apotheosis of Reaganomics

The previous post by Kent Comfort chronicles the economic revolution that commenced with the Reagan Administration. This post addresses the values wrought by the economic superstructure described by Kent.  A deep dive into philosophical movements that seeped into the American zeitgeist along with Friedman/University of Chicago radical free market nonsense is beyond the purview of this post.  Suffice it to say that Ayn Rand’s philosophy of selfishness, dog-eat-dog capitalism, and Nietzschean ubermensch (John Gault) seeped far deeper into the American zeitgeist than is readily apparent to most observers.  Along with the Randian virtue of selfishness, the nihilism and rejection of Enlightenment values of the postmodernist philosophical movement became de rigueur among intelligentsia – eventually on the right of American politics.

The changes we’ve seen entrenched in U.S. culture over the past 40 or more years can be characterized as the triumph of self-interest over public interest and community, the prevalence of wealth and power over equality, and the weakening of science engendered by disregard of and disrespect for reason and objectivity.  We are in a post-truth age characterized by deceit, manipulation, and cheating without accountability.  Any claim based on pseudoscience is deemed legitimate – especially if it is legitimated by journalists, politicians, and influential voices in academia.

In the winner take all, survival of the fittest, milieu, it is OK to spout falsehoods and engage in practices that would have been otherwise unethical and unacceptable in the pre-Reaganomics era.  Lying, cheating, stealing, and preying on the vulnerable and weak can be justified by absolutist beliefs in abstract principles.  In its most extreme form, Reaganomics is conflated with Christian fanaticism and right-wing, proto-fascist political movements.  Furthermore, extreme principles of the movement include total deregulation and dismantlement of the administrative state except insofar as it can further a free-wheeling corporate state.

In post-truth America, shareholder value as the highest value of business enterprise, doesn’t need to be justified scientifically as beneficial to the American people in general.  Universal human rights of equality and fairness handed down to us from the Enlightenment have been devalued while the powerful and wealthy leverage their power to degrade democratic processes and direct more and more economic resources from the middle- and low-income classes to themselves.  In the long run, we will see an increasing amount of tragedy and farce detrimental to the future of the planet and all living things.

REAGANOMICS, FRIEDMANOMICS, WELCHIANISM

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The RFW Debacle

By:

Kent Comfort

How Ronald Reagan, Milton Friedman and Jack Welch combined to misalign American Capitalism and the Economy

“In the beginning…”, there was Ronald Reagan, Milton Friedman, and Jack Welch. Or at least there are too many people who would like to think that they started a positive economic revolution. We have been living with the damage ever since.

Reagan was a convenient fool and puppet, Friedman was a misinterpreted false prophet, and Welch was just a crook. There you have it, three sacred cows butchered in one sentence!

Each of these men are now deceased, of course, but the legacy of the damage they caused lives on and on.

Reagan was a patsy for the deregulation crowd and that lead to immeasurable loss of many services for the commons. Airlines and railroads are two important examples of industries that no longer serve the public good beyond the extent to which they are forced to. They have been free to strip away humanitarian services and create mini monopolies. A mini monopoly is one which controls specific segments or geographical regions of the markets they serve with the advantage of not having to worry about competitors entering their space. Another prime example of this is the cable TV industry. Your zip code dictates who you have available for your household.

Friedman preached, do anything you want, buyer beware! He included a safety valve in his self-proclaimed predilections that everyone fails to mention if they even knew about it. He realized that many of his ideas contained considerable risk to American society. To protect those members of society who were not equipped to enter the business scrum, he advocated for a version of what we today call UBI, or Universal Basic Income. But his intentions were not necessarily noble. Rather, if the masses could count on some level of economic safety net, the business bandits could go about the task of creating metaphoric strip pits anywhere and everywhere they desired for their personal gain.

Welch rose to the top of a corporate mountain, namely General Electric, and drove it upside down in the ditch while trying to reinvent ancient accounting principles, and pile up a strange combination of acquisitions to create the impression of rapid growth. He ran for the hills just before the consequences caught up with him. For greater details about this travesty, check out a recent book titled “The Man Who Broke American Capitalism” by David Gelles. This might be the best biography about Welch ever written.

The ”everyone else is doing it” momentum took over for the following decades leading up to present time. Welch declared that American business only had one obligation. That was to serve the shareholders. It could be said that because this view became the norm, the words shareholder and stakeholder became no longer interchangeable. The American capitalism model damage is continuing unabated to this day. It does not matter which of the two political party monopolies are in the majority, neither has been willing to give up the largess they collect and instead focus on working to end these rotten practices.

That is an abbreviated overview of how we got to the low point we are at today. Let’s look at the four primary elements of the current capitalist system and how they harm more than help most of us.

They are the formula, the impact, the culture, and the future.

The Formula –

The American business formula can be boiled down to a simple equation: Deliver the least possible value for the highest possible price. If you pause for a moment to think about that statement, it is probably very easy to identify examples you encounter every day.

The skill required by a business entity to benefit from this formula demands that they do not take either end of the equation too far. On the low value end, if that is taken too far, loss of sales results. The same outcome applies to trying to charge too much for the value delivered. The practice becomes one of trying to balance both ends without giving up sales and consequent profits.

Let’s not forget that an important element of this formula has been the suppression of middle-class wages. They have actually gone down when adjusted for inflation, while the executive suite has been raiding the corporate coffers on a level not even imaginable prior to the RFW (Reagan-Friedman-Welch) era.

When one’s master is the shareholder, this is the only perceivable option. If a business is not beholden to masters who would dump their shares in a blink if they do not think it is making enough money, it can instead focus on delivering as much value as possible for the lowest price possible to earn a sufficient profit to sustain the business. That is truly possible and it is more typical of the way business was done before the advent of the RFW era.

A successful business could build a great reputation and be rewarded with repeat business from a satisfied customer. The profits from such high operating integrity could be reinvested both inside and outside the business to grow owner wealth over time. The quarterly report was never a necessity or useful tool.

The Impact –

The long-term impact of the above-described formula has been analogous to the well-known aphorism of the frog sitting calmly in the bottom of a pot of slow boiling water. Many would agree to the fact that the water is boiling today.

What is at the root of the impact? There has been a continuously growing gap between the value of a service and commodity and the escalating prices for them. Consider the “Made in” label on nearly any item in your house. “USA” is nearly non-existent. In fact, it is a selling point to proclaim a product as made domestically today because it is so uncommon.

Of course, the initial benefit to the product originator has been marginally reduced manufacturing costs. America has endeavored to impose regulations on child labor and other forms of involuntary and exploitative servitude that corporations have a history of not hesitating to deploy if there are no barriers. The amoral culture and policies of major corporations give leeway to these practices in the name of growing their profits for the Welchian philosophy of shareholder first no matter what. And China apparently does not aggressively enforce even the most lenient policies they proclaim regarding inhuman workplace conditions. American corporations do not interfere with Chinese labor practices and economic practices. The American people who consume the output of Chinese factories enjoy the perceived low out of pocket cost and do not question or challenge how or why they benefit from that. That is the nature of slow-boiling pots of water. The short-term benefits cloud the horizon of long-term damage.

Is this practice limited to only the multi-national corporate giants? Unfortunately, the answer is no. Here is a story that has been duplicated nationwide for decades. Yep, it is another slow-boiling pot story. Only this time, it is about a thriving midwestern family-owned multi-generational business that produced a globally popular product that you, the reader very likely have in your toolbox as you read this. If you don’t, then you may not even have a toolbox. This is the Vice Grip story. You have a pair, right?

The invention of this remarkable tool was accomplished by William Peterson in the late 1930’s. The product went through a series of refinements through the World War II years and began achieving popularity initially with farmers following the war. The location of this business was in the small agricultural community of Dewitt, Nebraska. The business grew and thrived under the able management of Dewitt’s son and two grandsons. They were a very generous family who employed and promoted people within the company until they had over 300 souls toiling away to supply a hungry market for a great tool. Community families prospered, sent their children to college, and everything about this saga epitomized the American dream. Until…..

Later generations of the Peterson family chose not to continue working in the business. Going away to college and seeing new horizons has a way of doing that to young people from small towns. So, the company was put on the market for sale, and according to the story it was a quick and easy sale. The new owners decided to close the Dewitt factory and move manufacturing to…wait for it….China! Those 330 employees were suddenly out of work. Multiply that number by and average household of four, and the negative impact to a small community is clear. Dewitt, Nebraska will never been the same.

A superbly handcrafted and high standard tool became a lower grade high volume throwaway tool, and copious profits were piled up consequently. If you were fortunate enough to have in your possession a Dewitt manufactured version of the Vice Grip, you probably still have it and it is still working as designed. If you have the Chinese made version, find and original version to compare it to. It will be clearly different.

This decline in value offset by increase in cost is not limited to your personal toolbox or any other product in your household. Consider your experience today with what is fictionally called customer service.

When you have the misfortune of needing to call your source for service, most often the individual on the other end of the call is offshore, entirely ignorant about the service or product you are having a problem with and trying to search for answers on their computer literally as they speak with you. You are nearly always placed on hold for two or three minutes several times during the call, so the support person to research what you are calling about because they do not know anything.

Most major American corporations who have products or services that require customer support use these offshore call centers. They are drastically cheaper than maintaining a state-side call center. But the damage their reputations incur often necessitate contracting with yet another specialty business. That would be the “reputation management” service.

It is uniquely American that reputation management is a growing industry. Companies are willing to spend millions having their soiled reputations professionally laundered instead of spending those same millions providing a higher quality service or product in the first place. Does that make any sense?

The Culture –

What is the downstream effect of the formula and impact described above? How does it degrade the culture of the nation and people? This is where the most severe damage is realized. Unless one is in a coma, awareness of how much cultural and economic deterioration has been accumulating during the last five decades is being realized and talked about at every tier of our social hierarchy. Virtually no one is content with the national homeostasis that has devolved during this time. Correspondingly, no one has any idea what to do about it. The social and economic deterioration was so gradual and so multi-layered that everyone has just acclimating to it while it has marched through our lives.

Disillusionment and a sense of being violated and cheated has led to a growing distrust in the institutions and commercial sources we believed we could rely on. That trust has eroded to the point that everyone has become more wary of everyone else.

When we feel powerless, fear becomes the primary emotion that guides all decisions. Strength and empowerment never emanate from fear. I would be willing to wager that most of the personal firearms sales today are motivated by little more than fear. Personal firearms are not rational protection from the kinds of fear most of us carry around. They are a symbol or metaphor for the sense of helplessness we feel in our daily environment.

The Future –

What will it bring us? That was a trick question. The better question is what kind of future we are going to bring ourselves. Whether we are individually and collectively proactive, or passive, the future is on the way. And even in passive mode, what comes will be of our making. Inaction is a form of action.

Nothing I have written about so far is unchangeable or irreparable. We made it what it is, and we can make it something else. There has to be a public will, supported by a public awareness that we are the masters of our lives and collective culture. We have been lazy. We have become addicted to the prevailing status quo, even if it is hurting us.

The regression and distrust that so many Americans live within today will have to change because nature is not static. Evolution is still very real. We can hope that history is not our guide or window of what is to come. The reason for that statement is that throughout history, sovereignties that degraded in the manner discerning humans are witnessing ultimately collapsed. Not talking about just a dip that they recovered from. They melted down into a form of dark ages that eventually led to a period of rebirth. The reset button was finally pushed after sufficient decay purged the prevailing policies that led to that downfall. I challenge anyone to find an exception to that. The best anyone will be able to do is recognize varying scales of collapse, not exceptions to collapse itself.

Are we ready to agree yet that the kind of social leadership that brought us to this threshold is not what is needed to lift us out of it?

Are we getting closer to agreeing that political parties have no solutions to the predicaments we live with today?

Can we imagine an electoral purge on a national scale that removes every electee from their perch and replaces them with new blood?

Can we turn a deaf ear to all the tired arguments about why experience matters and we need our incumbents to retain the power they have appropriated?

Can we become more personally engaged at the community level to initiate the paradigm shift that must and will happen even if we do nothing?            

I know I need to become more intimate with each of those questions in my own life, and I hope you will join me. Your comments and thoughts are encouraged and appreciated.

DEMOCRACY, CORPORATE FINANCE, & MEDICAL ETHICS

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Nursing Home Companies are Making Money but are Not Telling Taxpayers the Truth About it.  Our Deductive Reasoning Skills Can Easily Reveal the Truth.

Welltower Corporation is a major player in the nursing home industry. Indeed, it is the dominant player.  The major share of its $4.72 billion in 2021 revenue is provided by U.S. federal and state governments – from the taxpayers of America.  Their business is senior housing real estate and medical care for people residing in their nursing home properties. 

The public has a right to expect that medical care is the overriding mission of corporations involved in tax funded nursing care. That is not how Welltower executives view their role in the privatized, publicly funded, healthcare system.  In their 2021 annual report they stated, Our primary objectives are to protect stockholder capital and enhance stockholder value. We seek to pay consistent cash dividends to stockholders and create opportunities to increase dividend payments to stockholders as a result of annual increases in net operating income and portfolio growth (https://welltower.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/2020-Annual-Report.pdf, p. 2, accessed 5/21/2022).

Welltower is one of the few nursing home companies listed on a public stock exchange.  As their annual reports and the value of their stock in the current market crash indicate, they are achieving their financial objectives.  As the Dow, S&P, and NASDAQ have tanked in the past few months, shares of publicly listed nursing home-related corporations are at, near, or above their value in late November when the markets began to sink at significant and at times precipitous rates. 

These are solid corporations loaded up with commercial real estate, the value of which is enhanced by guaranteed revenue through Medicare, Medicaid, and generous tax advantages – gratis the U.S. taxpayers.  This is the reason asset managers such as BlackRock and Vanguard have guided $billions of pension, sovereign wealth, and family office, funds, overseen by institutional investors, into asset-laden nursing home companies. As the markets fall, they are not moving money out of these equities and seeking a safer haven (In a blog post today, I provide an analysis of the stock performance of nursing home and other government-funded medical care corporations between the end of November 2021 and the end of May 2022).

The Big Lie from the Nursing Home Industry: “We Aren’t Making Enough Money to Provide Medically Ethical & Humane Care.”

Thousands of privately held corporations in the form of Limited Liability Corporations, Limited Partnerships, and other legal structures own from a few to a hundred or more nursing homes. Examples include, the privately held Pruitt chain, Diversicare, and several other substantial chains operating in various parts the United States.  Years of interviewing employees, families of patients, reading inspection reports and media accounts, have convinced me that medical care in these facilities is substandard to nonexistent.  Abuse and neglect are pervasive.  Most of the care is provided by medically nonqualified and extremely low paid nursing assistants.  Generally speaking, these are inhumane institutions. The thought of ever ending up in one is horrifying to most people.

Industry Prevarication & Misinformation about High Investor Returns

Although, evidence overwhelmingly suggests that investors are reaping huge returns from shoddy care, the American Health Care Association (AHCA) –  the major industry lobbying firm and industry propaganda arm in Washington and the 50 states – successfully promotes a big lie:  “provider net income is so low that they can’t treat patients humanely or pay higher salaries and wages.” On its face, that is absurd. But apparently it hasn’t dawned on legislators, bureaucrats, and the media that investors wouldn’t be investing in a venture with low returns while so many opportunities for high returns are available in the financial markets.

My colleague, professor Charlene Harrington, and I have debunked that argument as it pertains to publicly listed companies. We, like the rest of the public, have access to financial statements required by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).[1]  However, we do not have access to consolidated financial reports for privately held companies. We can’t see their income statements, balance sheets, or cash flow statements. Therefore it is very difficult to evaluate industry claims regarding earnings – difficult but not impossible.

Each of the approximately 13,000 facilities licensed to provide nursing care and certified to be reimbursed by Medicare and Medicaid are required to submit “cost reports, which include revenue, expenses, net income, and a host of other financial metrics.  With the exception of California, these CRs are difficult to obtain. But we have now gained access to every filed CR in the U.S.  Our analysis so far is telling us that the low net claim is a big lie; that fraud is rampant; and, that states are failing to audit the reports.

Low Risk, High Return Fueled by Government Funds with Little Financial Oversight: the Reality of Nursing Home Investing

As we pour over CRs – mostly in California, New York, North Carolina, and Kansa – we see reported net income as a fiction.  We have also come to believe that the low 2020 net of .5% claimed by AHCA and its hired propaganda accounting firm Clifton, Larson, and Allen (CLA) is scurrilous nonsense – unbecoming of the 8th largest accounting firm in the U.S.

 As one example, misinformation, if not outright fraud, is replete in the CRs of 25 Kansas facilities owned by Florida based private equity firm Windward Health Partners, LLC. Although the average net income reported by these facilities is 8.6% – far higher than the average claimed by AHCA & CLA – they are not reporting payments to their own property LLCs. Also, their chain goes goes by the name of Mission Health Communities. What they don’t note on their CR is that MHC is a related party – a management LLC set up as a company they own and are paying to manage their facilities. Hence their net is drastically lowered due to payments to other companies they own.

 Although Mission Health Communities is falsely noted as the owner of these facilities, it exists as the typical private equity squeeze forced on victim companies.  Mission Health Communities is paid a management fee but is, in reality, a separate LLC in the Windward Health Partners portfolio.  That payment, along with a lease payment to a property LLC, and perhaps other payments to Windward owned ancillary services such as therapy, are expensed on the income statement. In effect, these facilities are making payments to entities owned by their parent corporations and reducing their net income reported to the State of Kansas.

According to CRs submitted by Windward, Kansas taxpayers paid the company $103,403,493 in total 2020 revenue. Because of omitted information and opaqueness of the system, only company insiders know how much cash flowed out in the form of lease payments, management fees, and possible other ancillary services. The 25 facilities received an average of $249,063 in COVID relief payments. I say cash because these payments to itself is gravy for partners and limited partners in Windward Health Partners, LLC.

Democracy & Medical Ethics

The people of Kansas have no idea about how their tax dollars are flowing out of their state into investment firms like Skyway Capital Partners of Tampa Bay, Florida – the financial firm that has capitalized Windward Health Partners. That is not because Kansas residents are dumb. Rather they don’t know how government funds flow from facilities to parent corporations structured as private equity, LLCs, C and S corporations, and limited partnerships, because the system is designed to operate behind a veil of secrecy. For the most part, the Kansas legislature and state bureaucrats have been captured by the industry.

Employees at the Kansas Department of Aging & Disability Services are far more protective of industry financial secrecy than they are of the public’s right to know how their tax dollars are being utilized. The deck is stacked in favor of the industry. Getting substantive information from KDADS is like getting red meat out of a tiger cage.

Medical care is substandard in nursing homes across Kansas but shareholder value overrides medical ethics. Indeed, you will be hard pressed to find a physician around a nursing home at any given time. You will also be hard pressed to find more than a hand full of physicians who really give a damn about what goes on these institutions. The medical profession is silent, the bioethics profession is silent, and the voters are kept in the dark. That’s not how democracy is supposed to work.

[1]Kingsley D, Harrington C. (2021) “COVID-19 had little financial impact on publicly traded nursing home companies.) J Am Geriatr Soc. 2021;1–4. https://doi; Kingsley, D Harrington, C. “Financial and Quality Metrics of A Large, Publicly Traded U.S. Nursing Home Chain in the Age of Covid-19, International Journal of Health Services, 1-13, https://doi: 10.1177/00207314221077649.

Are Nursing Homes a Good Deal for Investors? Don’t Believe the Nursing Home Industry’s Propaganda: Look at How Their Stock is Doing as the Market Tanks.

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Dave Kingsley

The Market has Tanked but Most Nursing Home Stock Made Significant Gains or is Holding Steady At or Near its High of Late November

According to the American Health Care Association (AHCA), the nursing home industry lobbying and propaganda organ, providers struggle to squeeze out a tiny profit from a very tough business. As anyone who reads this blog will surmise, I don’t believe that and have an abundance of evidence to debunk the “low margin/profit big lie.”

One place to look for evidence of the industry’s big lie is the network of stock exchanges and indexes: the NYSE, NASDAQ, DOW, and S&P 500. The performance of nursing home industry shares in relation to these exchanges and indexes are indications of how they are viewed by major investors such as BlackRock, Vanguard, Charles Schwab, and other asset managers for institutional investors such as pension, college endowment, sovereign wealth, and family office funds.

At the close of the market on Friday, May 20th, 2022, the value of assets on the NASDAQ had dropped by 30 percent from its high on November 29th, 2021. The DOW was down by 11%, and the S&P closed 16.2% lower. As the table below suggests, the stock of the small number of publicly traded nursing home corporations has overall fared very well in a market downturn of major proportions. Seven of the 10 corporations that are players in the nursing home industry have minor to very large increases in their share prices since November 29th.

Genesis corporation is no longer listed on a major exchange such as the NASDAQ. At one time, Genesis was the dominant player in the industry. Due to a private equity takeover and subsequent looting, its value (market cap) sank so low that it is now traded over the counter (OTC) as “penny stock” worth 10 cents a share. Hence, a drop from 22 cents a share in late November to 10 cents at the close on Friday, is a 55% drop that has little to do with the overall value of the industry.

COMPANYPRICE 11/29PRICE 5/20% CHANGE
BROOKDALE$6.30$5.48-13
ENSIGN GROUP$77.20$79.03+2.3
HEALTHPEAK$34.06$29.42-13.6
LTC PROPERTIES$31.91$37.28+16.8
NATIONAL HEALTH CARE$65.82$69.86+6.1
NATIONAL HEALTH INV.$52.29$55.78+6.6
SABRA$13.03$13.13+.76
VENTAS$49.12$56.52+15.1
WELLTOWER$82.04$88.11+7.4
GENESIS$0.22$0.10-55.0
CARETRUST$20.18$17.27-14.4

Did You Know?

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Dave Kingsley

  • On July 30, 1943, Marie-Louise Girard was the last woman guillotined in France.  Her crime:  assisting women with abortion.  Many of the women she was helping had been raped by Nazi occupiers.  A 1988 movie, Story of Women, dramatizes her life.

  • Between 1908 and the present time, approximately 400,000 U.S. residents have been forcibly sterilized by state and federal government bureaucracies.  The U.S. Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of state sterilization laws in the 1927 case of Buck v. Bell, Superintendent 274 U.S. 200.  Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote the majority opinion in which he stated the following: It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes.  Three generations of imbeciles are enough.

    Buck v. Bell     is still extant case law – it has never been overturned.  The state of Oregon carried out a state ordered sterilization in 1981.  Over the past few decades evidence of involuntary hysterectomies and tubal ligations carried out on ICE detainees and women prisoners in the California prison system has been consistently surfacing.
     
  • Louisiana House Bill 813, which has cleared the Louisiana House Committee on Criminal Justice by a vote of 7 to 2, defines abortion as homicide, which would carry a penalty of life in prison without the possibility of parole.  Critics of the legislation have argued that the bill will even outlaw use of IUDs as a contraceptive.

  • Aging prisoners have been the fastest growing demographic in the vast U.S. prison system. Human Rights Watch estimates that the age 65 or older inmate population grew an astonishing 94 times faster than the total sentenced prisoner population between 2007 and 2010. The older prison population increased by 63 percent, while the total prison population grew by 0.7 percent during the same period.
    Source: (https://www.hrw.org/report/2012/01/27/old-behind-bars/aging-prison-population-united-states).

Bioethics:  Institutionalization & the Rights of Humans to Control their Bodies.

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Involuntary Institutionalization & Human Rights, & Humane Treatment

Individuals institutionalized involuntarily in prisons, nursing homes, immigration detention centers, and juvenile facilities, are vulnerable to abusive, neglectful, and often deadly treatment.  These groups of U.S. residents are overwhelmingly institutionalized under conditions in which authorities, professionals, staffs, and other inmates control their daily routines and other living conditions. They may be subjected to psychotropic drugs, which deprive them of liberty and cause them mental and physical health problems, to violence from other inmates and staff, and medical procedures, which may occur with or without their consent.

In addition to forcible and invasive medical treatment, needed and even preventative medical care is often withheld.  As my previous blog post suggested, leading, establishment bioethicists have theorized – shamefully I might add – that withholding beneficial medical care from the elderly would have a positive effect on the U.S. economy by lowering government budgets. They conclude, therefore, that it is morally justified and medically ethical to intentionally shorten the lives of t elderly and disabled Americans.

The desire of religious and governmental institutions to exercise control over the bodies of human beings under their control has been a threat to human rights throughout history.  Power and control are fundamental principles underpinning forcible sterilization, involuntary psychotropic protocols, denial of birth control/abortion, and torturous incarceration.  Indeed, a woman’s right to terminate a pregnancy or even to use contraceptives such as the “morning after” pill will probably be outlawed in the U.S. within a mere month or two by a Supreme Court, religious extremist, majority.

The elderly, women, ethnic minorities, immigrants, and impoverished classes are a threat to the power and economic interests of white (Euro-American) patriarchal ruling elites.  Therefore, as a ruse in protecting their power and economic domination, establishment elites have devised methods for undermining attempts by the powerless classes to organize and influence change in power relationships.

Criminalizing & Institutionalizing the Poor and Powerless is Profitable

Institutionalization, along with abusive and neglectful treatment of inmates, involve blunt instruments such as drugging, restraining, and hitting.  However, these conditions are facilitated by misfeasance and nonfeasance on the part of government agencies and legislators.  Furthermore, the efficiencies of these management techniques are compatible with privatization. Over the past century, industrialists have recognized opportunities in the commoditization of human bodies in nursing homes, ICE detention centers, prisons, juvenile facilities, and other institutions for the powerless.

Hence the real estate housing inmates and government funds for managing and controlling human bodies within four walls have proven to be quite lucrative.  Investors in prisons, ICE detentions centers, and nursing homes have become fabulously wealthy (or have added an extraordinary amount to their family wealth).  Given the corrupt nature of politics, shameless and blatant purchase of legislators’ approval for the ongoing atrocity of institutionalization for the sake of enriching the already rich, transforming inhumane institutions will be a heavy lift.  We must end them – not mend them through sham recommendations from commissions controlled by the power elite.

Leading Bioethicists Do Not Believe that the Elderly Have Equal Rights in the U.S. Medical Care System

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Dave Kingsley

Nursing Homes & COVID:  200,000 Fatalities in One Institutionalized Population

Last week, the U.S. officially recognized a COVID death toll of one million U.S. residents.  An estimated 200,000 or 20 percent of those deaths have occurred in nursing homes. At any given time, individuals in long-term care/skilled nursing institutions comprise approximately three-tenths of one percent of the U.S. population.  One would think that an investigation would be under way to determine how such a tragedy could occur in one institutionalized population and who is accountable.

There is no doubt that a huge proportion of these deaths were preventable.  However, due to neglect and greed of corporate providers, paid by taxpayers to care for patients in LTC/SKN facilities, and lax government regulation, COVID was allowed to sweep through institutions housing frail elderly and disabled Americans. This resulted in the largest mass fatality of an institutionalized population in the history of the United States.   

Appallingly, interest in accountability for this human rights atrocity on the part of politicians, the media, the medical professions, government agencies, or any other relevant interest group is nonexistent.  Even two commissions on nursing homes – one specifically charged with investigating COVID in LTC/SKN institutions and one under the auspices of the National Academies Science Engineering & Medicine (NASEM released a report barely a month ago) – ignored the issue of industry culpability.

The industry is culpable.  It was well-known that a novel virus was likely to make its way to the United States eventually.  For decades, scientists have been sounding alarms.  Asian countries learned from the SARS pandemic and issued guideline for protecting patients from raging viral pandemics.  Those guidelines were ignored by the U.S. nursing home industry.

Indifference to an unnecessary mass fatality event is occurring in a context of long-developing denigration of the worthiness and value of elderly and disabled Americans.  Religions and their leaders have been absent from and seemingly uninterested in the plight of institutionalized people needing nursing care. Indeed, many deplorable facilities are affiliated with major religious organizations.

And then there is the question of bioethics and decline of Enlightenment and Judeo-Christian ethics as they pertain to persons needing medical care.  Indeed, the current dominant bioethics movement supports withholding beneficial medical care from the elderly for the sake of the market economy and what they erroneously see as federal budgetary constraints.

The Elderly & Human Rights in a Neoliberal Capitalist Society

As a highly visible extremist Catholic majority on the nine member U.S. Supreme Court “legislates” on human rights for a population of 340 million citizens, a small group of America’s most prominent and powerful bioethicists are engaged behind the scenes in a chilling, ageist movement – mostly in academic journals. Few Americans are aware of the proposals for “rationing” medical care concocted by Daniel Callahan of the prestigious Hasting Center on Bioethics, celebrity physician Zeke Emmanuel, and other well-known bioethicists.[1]

The underlying philosophical/ethical, foundation of these physicians’-academicians’ rationale is a toxic, perverse, combination of utilitarianism and neoliberal economics rather than a profound and humane theoretical framework calling for reinforcement of universal human rights based on Enlightenment values and ethics.  The essence of their reasoning is that the U.S. cannot afford all the medical care needed by the U.S. population, therefore some needed care should be directed away from the elderly to young populations who are of more value to society, i.e., from the less productive to the more productive.

A review of the literature clearly exposes two unexamined and flawed premises of this horrifying philosophical/ethical position: (1) the U.S. economic system cannot absorb the cost of needed medical care for all citizens, and (2) the elderly are not as worthy as younger cohorts.  Proponents argue from these premises to the conclusion that it is OK to shorten the lives of elderly Americans for the sake of reducing costs.

Integral to their position is the concept of a “decent minimum level of medical care.”[2]  Schneiderman defines a decent level of medical care as:

“…a level of medical care that enables a person to acquire an education, seek or hold a job, or raise a family.  Or, if the person, because of impaired health, is unable to meet any of these goals, to attain a reasonable level of function within the person’s limits and respectful of the person’s dignity, as well as a reasonable level of comfort, whether it be from pain or other forms of suffering.”[3]

This statement clearly expresses an opinion contrary to humanistic ethics that grew out of the Enlightenment and formed the philosophical underpinnings of liberal democracy. The bioethicists in this movement have a perspective of human beings through the lens of bioethical utilitarianism in which their right to medical care is reduced to their worth in a radical free-market economic system.  As Schneiderman states: “Without the support of society, the individual would not prosper; in return, I argue, the individual has a duty to recognize society’s needs for productive citizenry.”[4]  He proceeds to claim that “The success of the society depends on the productivity and contributions of its individual members.”[5]

The Context of Rationing Bioethics

As prior quotes suggest, a powerful group of bioethicists are valuing humans for the purposes of medical care based on their value to the economic system.  Without operationalizing “productivity” and “contribution,” they presuppose a declining value of aging human beings because of less engagement in and usefulness to the economic sector of society. Wisdom, life experience, leadership ability, and other contributions needed by an enlightened, democratic society are not only discounted, but given no worth whatsoever. 

As Zeke Emmanuel, the most famous bioethicist in the U.S., wrote in the Atlantic, it is best to die by 75 because life is not worth living past that age and all productivity and contributions cease.[6] Dr. Emmanuel equates “living too long” with living beyond our 75th birthday.  He claims that longevity “robs us of our creativity and ability to contribute to work, society, the world.”  That it “transforms how people experience us, relate to us, and most importantly remember us.  Dr. Emmanuel believes we are, after age 75, “no longer remembered as vibrant and engaged but as feeble, ineffectual, even pathetic.

Culling the Herd:  Let the Old Die

At some point in U.S. history, elders were no longer seen as important to the survival of the family, community, and nation.  That sociology and history – the history of transformation of valued elders to useless, dependent old people – has been covered elsewhere.  In radical free market economic systems, individuals not needed are vulnerable.  Public policy tends to reflect the power of industrialists and the economic values guiding politicians.

It has not been uncommon for media personalities to suggest that people dying in nursing homes were probably near death anyway.  So, not a big loss.  As Bill O’Reilly on FOX put it, “they had one foot in the grave any way.”  Some suggested that diseases “cull the herd,” and who better to go than old people. 

In a country as wealthy and advanced as the United States, there is absolutely no reason to deny health care to citizens and other residents based on their worthiness as human beings.  There should be no place in a humane society for “deserving” and “undeserving” people in need of medical care.  Medical ethics require nothing less than deference to physician-patient decisions about needed, beneficial, care.  Unfortunately, in the privatized system now dominating U.S. medicine, the needs of shareholders and executives take precedence over people with medical needs.

[1] See e.g., Daniel Callahan (2009) Taming the Beloved Beast.  Princeton University Press; Lawrence J. Schneiderman (2011) “Rationing Just Medical Care,” American Journal of Bioethics, Volume 11, Number 7, 7-14.; Norman Daniels (2013) “Global Aging and the Allocation of Health Care Across the Life Span” American Journal of Bioethics, American Journal of Bioethics, Volume 13, 2013, 1-2.

[2] Schneiderman, ibid, page 8.

[3] Schneiderman, ibid, page 8.

[4] Schneiderman, Ibid, page 8.

[5] Schneiderman, Ibid, page 8.

[6] Ezekiel J. Emmanuel (2014) “Why I Hope to Die at 75,” The Atlantic, October,2014 Issue. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/10/why-i-hope-to-die-at-75/379329/.