‘Unlimited dollars’: how an Indiana hospital chain took over a region and jacked up prices

This is the stuff I think about whenever people are murdered by cops for shoplifting or selling loose cigarettes. It's 100% legal to steal if you're doing it with a hospital via price gouging, or selling junk loans through a bank, or operating a casino.

It's also what I think about whenever someone talks about atrocities in Syria or rocket attacks in Israel. Here in America we kill our people in the civilized way: via capitalism, and we think it magically makes us more moral.

Revenue pressure was even brought down to the level of nurses – some of whom say they have been pushed to charge for the smallest of items from Kleenexes to batteries. One 2022 email, obtained by the Guardian, shows a supervisor at Parkview DeKalb telling nurses that she had reviewed their charts for the week and found they had “missed” $50,000 in charges as a team. The following year, managers told staff to be more stringent about how many linen towels they handed out to patients – an initiative they termed “linen stewardship”.

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This fiscal year it found roughly $140m to pour into capital projects across greater Fort Wayne – investments that, a Moody’s report from July noted, will help further its goal of regional expansion.

Also mentioned in the article....some hospitals have their own private police forces.

I live in this city, yay