Steven Brill: Corporate Shill

Steven Brill: Corporate Shill

What if I were to tell you that those hospitals which were “outed” as charge abusers by Steven Brill in his massively boring TIME Magazine article will ultimately be the biggest beneficiaries of this diabolical piece of journalism?

Stay with me and we’ll go through it.  Looking back at my initial reaction to this piece by Brill,  I was excited that he revealed how obscenely wealthy these poor-mouthing hospitals really were.  I was troubled, however,  by what he didn’t mention (the uncompensated care scam and PPO cartels and repricing schemes) and even more troubled that he embraced the efficiency of Medicare.  I am now convinced that the reason this piece appeared in TIME (no bastion of libertarianism) at this time is to fuel the movement for a single payer system.  Here’s how I came to this conclusion.

I have maintained all along that Obamacare was meant to fail, designed to fail.  The purpose of this legislation was to introduce such chaos into the medical marketplace, eliminating what little was left of the free market in medicine, that prices for care would soar, prices for “insurance” would soar and that access to medical care would be restricted.  The creation of this “crisis” will lead to a crying out for the government to ride in to rescue us with their final solution, the sequel to Obamacare:  single payer.  Watch this 37 second youtube video of Barney Frank where he carelessly reveals the ultimate goal.  

Nothing in Brill’s article is new.  Charge-master price gouging by these big hospitals has been going on for years and many articles have been written about it.  The full effect of Obamacare’s “high price crisis” haven’t yet been felt or realized by the public, so corporate healthcare must tell everyone how expensive health care is at these out of control hospitals….with a megaphone.  Brill’s article pours gasoline on the “crisis,” a crisis the most gigantic beneficiary of which are the big hospitals!

Jim Epstein of Reason Magazine encouraged me while filming his mini-documentary about our facility to look for industry consolidation in all its forms.  This, he maintained, was the smoking gun of government corruption and bribery.  The primary purpose of Obamacare is just this, fewer players in the hospital and insurance industry, with all health care dollars going to them.  Can you imagine the money flowing into the D.C. cesspool when discussions begin about carving the country into regions, each region provided “insurance” by a single company or care provided by a single hospital health “system?”  The intention of Brill’s piece, I believe, was the  creation of the outrage, a necessary precursor of “crying out for a solution.”

Karl Denninger devastates the Wall Street Journal’s pathetic response to Brill’s article here.  Denninger gets it.  One thing Denninger left out, however, was the Hill-Burton legislation and the devastation that followed that piece of crony-benefitting legislation.  He is right to call the WSJ out for their silence on how we got into this mess.

Corporate healthcare and their Wall Street chums are licking their chops right now, as Brill’s article brings the crisis from which they will all profit from so obscenely, closer and closer.  I’ve decided that Brill is a shill.  I’d bet that Brill’s stock portfolio is full of corporate health care stocks, too.

G. Keith Smith, M.D.