Even Elizabeth Warren Knows Big Medicine Is Robbing You Blind

When Even the Left Accidentally Tells the Truth

I keep a file for rare moments like this. Elizabeth Warren posted something this week that I have essentially been screaming about for years. One corporation should not own your health insurer, your doctor’s office, your pharmacy, and the middleman deciding what prescriptions you can have. That is not a healthcare system. That is a vertical monopoly designed to extract money from sick people.

And she is correct. I said it. Mark the calendar.

But here is the part that should make your blood boil. Warren was in the Senate when Obamacare passed. The legislation she supported turbocharged the very consolidation she is now pretending to oppose. The corporate takeover of medicine did not happen in spite of government intervention. It happened because of it.

This Is the Same Racket Wall Street Ran

I have been making this argument about financial services for my entire career. When you allow a profession to be owned by a corporation, traded on a stock exchange, or controlled by private equity, you have fundamentally changed whose interests that professional serves.

• Doctors owned by hospital systems answer to administrators, not patients
• Financial advisors owned by big banks answer to the firm, not the client
• The repeal of Glass-Steagall gave us too-big-to-fail banks and a 2008 collapse
• The corporate takeover of medicine is giving us the same result in healthcare

This is not a coincidence. It is a pattern. And the people who enabled it keep getting elected to fix it.

The Jobs Data Nobody Is Talking About

Here is a number that should stop you cold. When you look at cumulative U.S. job creation, healthcare jobs account for the overwhelming majority of what this economy is producing. And most of those jobs are not clinical. They are administrative. Billing specialists. Prior authorization coordinators. Compliance managers.

We have built a massive, expensive machine whose primary output is paperwork. And you are paying for all of it, every time you get sick.

This is also why politicians will not fix it. Those administrative jobs are in someone’s district. Those are votes. The system self-perpetuates because dismantling it has a political cost.

Mises Explained This a Century Ago

Ludwig von Mises proved in the 1920s that centrally controlled economies cannot function because they eliminate price discovery. No free market means no pricing mechanism. No pricing mechanism means no rational economic calculation. You literally cannot determine whether resources are being used efficiently.

Healthcare in America is not a free market. Prices are hidden. Costs are negotiated between giant corporations and government bureaucracies. The patient, the actual human being who is sick, has zero information and zero leverage.

That is not a healthcare system. That is a toll booth at every point of vulnerability in your life.

The Diagnosis Is Right. The Doctor Is Compromised.

Warren sees the problem. Her solution, more government, more mandates, expanded Medicare, is the same thinking that created the problem in the first place.

Real reform means:

• Breaking the corporate ownership of professions
• Requiring genuine price transparency in healthcare
• Eliminating the middlemen layers that exist only to extract margin
• Restoring the doctor-patient relationship as the center of medicine

The free market did not destroy healthcare. The destruction of the free market in healthcare is what created this mess. And until we are honest about that, every proposed fix is just rearranging deck chairs while the system picks your pocket.