There have been multiple reports about insurance companies and for-profit hospital chains committing massive fraud all across the country. The fraud is massive, endemic, and widespread.
On December 2, 2012 60 Minutes reported that Health Management Associates, the fourth-largest hospital chain in the country "relentlessly pressured its doctors to admit more and more patients -- regardless of medical need -- in order to increase revenues."
It is estimated that this type of fraud costs the country (taxpayers) $210 billion annually.
As these criminal health care cartels continue to bilk the taxpayers (with the help of bought off politicians of both major political parties), their actions are getting more brazen... As we enter a new era of rampant criminality and wrongdoing by increasingly powerful big business criminal cartels in the country, with little or no consequences, in effect creating an environment where the rich and powerful and well-connected can commit crimes with impunity, their actions become more and more sadistic, and predatory.
For the latest dastardly acts by the criminal health care cartel, check out the article by Bloomberg, "For-Profit Nursing Homes Lead in Overcharging While Care Suffers."
The reports are truly horrific:
At a nursing home in South Carolina owned by Life Care Centers of America Inc., an 80-year-old woman who couldn’t control her head or keep her eyes open was placed in a standing frame for 84 minutes of physical and occupational therapy just two days before she died...
Patients at the homes were left unattended for hours in soiled clothing, denied meals and baths and suffered infections and malnutrition, according to evidence in the class-action trial.
We need to remove the profit motive from health care; we need a single payer healthcare system. The longer we delay in becoming a civilized country when it comes to health care, the worst it's going to get, with countless people victimized, brutalized, abused, tortured, by the scum-sucking criminal cartel that makes much of the for-profit health care system in this country.