vol. 3 issue 17
Greetings,
Those of you who have been with docu-mental from the beginning might recall that I am a former antitrust reporter and that I think monopolies are evil. I really do. If you search the archives, look for “monopoly”, “CVS”, “healthcare”, “Wells Fargo”,“antitrust”, and “big is bad” for more of my thoughts on that.
Big, bloated institutions in general, and monopolies in particular, are anathema to freedom. They resemble The Borg in Gene Roddenberry’s science fiction where “resistance is futile”. Add “The Borg” to your search and you can find more of my thoughts on that, too.
Only, resistance is not futile when there is on earth a place where a system of government was created for the collective genius to function in service to the highly individuated citizen. In case you’ve forgotten, that would be here in the US.
Instead, we've largely outsourced our collective genius to whoever figured out how to make us feel most special (search the archives for “stories”, “E pluribus unum”, and “outsource”), leading us to become consumers/slaves to monopolies instead of citizens, virtually cancelling our power to resist all that bigness, and tricking us into handing over our power to corporations who love to tell us government is what is “too big and bad”, and that they only have our best interests in mind.
Now, our leaders and lawmakers largely not only don’t hold large corporations accountable, we have allowed them to pillory the spirit and function of our democracy by letting Capitalism go berserk, allowing our bureaucracies to become either gutted or bloated, depending upon whether the bureau is intended to oversee the public trust or kill and conquer.
I don’t think Capitalism’s greatest heights, with its potential to actually be of service to everyone, has ever been reached, because that really has never been the goal.
Sameness, elitism, and power in the hands of a few always has been the actual finish line, such that it's a foregone conclusion too many find impossible to admit, much less argue against because it's so intrinsic to the system, as laid out in this fantastic op-ed by philosopher and author, George Yancy, PhD.
You know the trope about how a fish in water thinks, “What water?” That applies here.
The bland cabal has been kept in place partly through corporate power, which is one reason it's intriguing to watch Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell threaten corporations who he thinks are getting too soft on rank and file citizens instead of rank whiteness, as he did when those headquartered in Georgia actually bent to consumer pressure and decided to pipe up against that state’s ballsy moves to restrict access to the ballot box, again.
All this to say that as a former healthcare antitrust reporter, I'm particularly sensitive to monopolistic moves in the sector, and since this month we're on the topic of personalized medicine that time forgot, I'd like to bring to your attention yet another move by a health insurance megalamonsterlopoly that threatens to complete its transformation of us all into The Healthcare Borg.
Co-written by healthcare antitrust expert, Olivia Webb, a friend of and previous guest on the docu-mental podcast, this article in The American Prospect about how UnitedHealth plans to essentially become the amazon of our healthcare data caused me to despair. If the healthcare insurance giant is allowed to purchase and vertically integrate the healthcare data company called Change, as Olivia and her colleague, Krista Brown report, then nothing about your health will be a solely personal matter ever again, so long as you are part of the system.
Write Brown and Webb:
[UnitedHealth/]Optum’s acquisition of Change heralds the end of that status quo and the emergence of a new “Big Tech” of health care. With the Change data, Optum/UnitedHealth will own the data, providers, and the network through which people receive care. It’s not a stretch to see an analogy to Amazon, and how that corporation uses data from its platform to undercut third parties while keeping all its consumers in a panopticon of data.
One of the ways—perhaps, in an era where antitrust enforcement remains mostly flaccid, the only way—to get corporate behemoths to not act with such arrogant assurance is to boycott them, as we have seen in Georgia.
Right. If someone out there has figured out how to successfully boycott the overreaching, omnipotent and omnipresent, yet very few in number health insurance companies whose “services” we are essentially mandated to buy in this country (or face either penalties or even more exorbitant prices to access it), I'd like to know about it.
The UnitedHealth/Optum/Change merger has yet to go through, and the Department of Justice asked last month for extra time to decide whether to challenge it. Per usual, when they plan on announcing their decision is top secret.
But if it does go through, as Brown and Webb conclude, “We face a future in which UnitedHealth/Optum is undoubtedly ‘the thing that ate American health care.’”
I realize antitrust law seems complicated, but it really isn't. Either we are the ones in charge of our lives, the ones who decide what healthcare services we value and wish to have affordable access to, as well as the public resources to conduct further research into, or we just admit we really do believe that resistance is futile.
Peace,
Whitney