Capital-holding parasites at work — consider extortionate flu shot pricing

26 November 2019

The more one looks into unregulated capitalism . . .

. . . the more one discovers societally approved parasitism.

A simple example — the grossly variable costs of flu shots

Writing for Kaiser Health News, Phil Galewitz said that:

In the Byzantine world of health care pricing, most people wouldn’t expect that the ubiquitous flu shot could be a prime example of how the system’s lack of transparency can lead to disparate costs.

[Professor Ge] Bai said the variation in payments for flu shots has nothing to do with the cost of the drug but is a result of negotiations between health plans and providers.

Cigna paid $32 to CVS for a flu shot in downtown Washington and $40 to CVS less than 10 miles away in Rockville, Md.

Cigna paid $47.53 for a flu shot from a primary care doctor with MemorialCare in Long Beach. But it paid $85 for a shot given at a Sacramento doctors’ office affiliated with Sutter Health . . . .

“Sutter has huge clout in California, and insurers have no other option than to pay Sutter the price,” Bai said.

In October, [Sutter] settled a lawsuit brought by the state attorney general, employers and unions that accused the hospital giant of illegally driving up prices.

The $85 was not just far more than what Cigna paid elsewhere but also more than triple the price Sutter advertises on its website for people without insurance: $25.

In Washington, D.C., Medicaid pays $15. In Connecticut, $19.

“We see the same pattern for more expensive services like MRIs or knee replacements,” [Kaiser Family Foundation vice president Cynthia Cox] said.

“That variation in prices is part of what’s driving insurance premiums higher in some parts of the country.”

“We don’t have a functioning health care market because of all this lack of transparency and opportunities for price discrimination,” [Professor Glenn] Melnick said.

Multiply these dollar differences. Some of these corporations are walking away with truckloads of essentially extortion-derived money.

Notice that

Defenders of capitalism pretend that markets are transparent and that people have:

full information about everything concerning those markets — either immediately or soon after the "markets" metaphorically open

and

consumers have a companion ability to go somewhere else to get the same goods or services.

This is unalloyed bullshit.

In the corporatist-monopoly world, almost no one has significantly telling information about anything. Much less the opportunity to go somewhere else.

Ask yourself (for example) how much "say" ordinary folk have in agreeing to the fine print-concealed, forced arbitration contracts that we "accept" every time we buy or use something.

Capitalists hide conceal their predatory ways under societally approved camouflage

The people getting fleeced are, directly or indirectly, you and me and the rest of the country's figurative 99 percent.

The moral? — We live in a system that is viciously slanted toward making Big Wealth richer

This fat cat and corporatist elite protects itself from more egalitarian counter-movements by pretending that everyone has an equal opportunity to engage in the same forms of parasitism.

Even as a matter of logic, equal capitalistic opportunity does not exist. If parasites had victims who equally parasitized them back, how would capitalists have enough advantage to "profit"?

Blood-sucking is the nature of our capital-dominated system. Leech-like behavior always requires warmly inert or unaware victims.

The United States' capital-worshipping legal and philosophical regimen guarantees that most people's primary "opportunity" is to become fresh meat for pillagers.

Waking up in massive numbers would be self-protecting.

PeteFree.com

Capital-holding parasites at work — consider extortionate flu shot pricing