Corporate Hospitals Bilking Americans as GOP Destroys Health Care

[erronis]

https://prospect.org/2026/05/08/corporate-hospitals-bilking-americans-gop-destroys-health-care/
Whitney Curry Wimbish -- The American Prospect

See also: GOP War on Health Care Destroying Hospitals at Home and Abroad

The largest corporate health care hospitals in the country are consolidating their power and using it to rip off patients, a new study from Families USA shows. Released amid the GOP's manufactured affordability crisis, the study shows that health care executives at a handful of corporations are setting "high and irrational prices" in every state and charging patients almost three times what Medicare pays for the exact same service.

The 15 largest systems charged an average of 282 percent more than the Medicare rate, the study found, resulting in $22 million in profit per hospital per year.

Executives are charging patients the most in Colorado, Florida, Georgia, New Mexico, South Carolina, West Virginia, and Wisconsin, where average corporate hospital prices are even higher, between 320 and 365 percent more than the Medicare rate.

The reason hospital executives can do this is because they are consolidating at a rapid clip, buying up independent providers, and jacking up prices at will. Five or fewer corporations in 42 states and the District of Columbia "controlled at least half of all hospital care in 2023," researchers found. In almost half of all states, just three corporations controlled the majority of hospital care. Hospital executives have no competition or regulations to discipline their price-gouging, so they "can charge basically whatever they want, because they can," said Anthony Wright, executive director of Families USA.

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[justaprogressive]

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