The landlord gutting America’s hospitals
US health spending and poor outcomes
- Commenters agree the US spends far more per capita than peers yet has worse coverage and outcomes.
- Explanations offered: price-gouged services and drugs, higher provider fees, intense lobbying against cost controls, and vast billing/claims bureaucracy.
- Some add that the US effectively has a “universal ER system” for the destitute, which is both extremely expensive and ineffective compared to routine primary care.
Access, utilization, and wait times
- One view: Americans “consume more healthcare” and see doctors more often with shorter waits than Europeans.
- Others strongly dispute this, citing data on fewer annual doctor visits, long US wait times, and spikes in diagnoses at Medicare eligibility, suggesting people delay care.
- Anecdotes from US, European, Canadian, and post‑Soviet contexts show highly variable wait times everywhere; MRI access is debated, with US overuse and iatrogenic harms mentioned.
Financialization and asset stripping
- Sale‑leaseback deals (e.g., hospital sells real estate, then leases it back) are described as classic private‑equity asset stripping: legal but socially harmful, turning hospitals into rent funnels for landlords.
- Some argue this is just “restructuring” and failing hospitals should be allowed to fold; others counter that “creative destruction” is unacceptable for essential services like regional hospitals.
Profit motive vs public service
- Many argue hospitals (especially rural) don’t work as profit‑seeking businesses and should be municipal or non‑profit, with strict rules on closures and capability reductions.
- Counterpoint: most US hospitals are already non‑profit, yet still behave extractively; the real issue is incentives and ownership of land and cashflows, not tax status alone.
Markets, regulation, and system design
- One camp sees healthcare as inherently ill‑suited to free‑market logic (emergencies, information asymmetry, non-optional nature), favoring single‑payer and more public planning.
- Another pushes for more supply, less regulation (easier immigration for clinicians, lighter drug/device approvals), more price transparency, and dismantling PBMs, arguing that constrained markets create today’s high prices.
- There is broad agreement that some form of rationing is inevitable—via waitlists in socialized systems or denials and prices in for‑profit ones.
Broader political and media context
- Several comments criticize capitalism’s tendency toward rent‑seeking and capital’s dominance over social good, citing opioids and hospital real‑estate plays.
- Others caution that the piece’s collaboration with Al Jazeera (Qatar state media) is itself politically motivated, calling the framing propaganda even if the underlying US problems are real.