Will Big Money in Politics under Trump Help or Harm Health Care?
America’s sick care system is already working as designed, treating patients as customers and prioritizing profits over people. That’s why Americans pay twice as much as other rich nations who have universal healthcare. Even though we spent $4.7 trillion in 2023, we have shorter average longevity and generally worse outcomes, except for the rich.
While asking why that’s so and exploring needed reforms, I quickly concluded the only way to fix our broken healthcare system is to fix our broken politics, and to do that, we must get big money out. But it seems things could get worse if democracy is replaced by oligarchy under a Donald Trump administration.
Big Money in Politics Just Got Bigger
Elon Musk blew the roof off of political donations to get Trump reelected, and his reward was both immediate and massive. According to this video featuring Scott Galloway, after contributing $277 million to Trump’s campaign and inauguration, Musk’s net worth increased $200 billion, suggesting a return on investment of over 50,000%.
Mark Zuckerberg also stands to profit handsomely from his political investment in Trump. He personally donated $1 million to Trump’s inauguration and now hopes to strengthen the competitive position of Meta, which already owns 2/3 of all social media globally. Does anyone else see a problem with this?
Super-rich oligarchs across the nation and world also learned from the 2024 election. They saw there’s almost no other investment a company can make that offers greater ROI than political investments that help them shape regulatory environments for competitive advantage and increased monopoly power. That includes the medical industrial complex, which could justify investing $1 trillion in a single election cycle to avoid future health reforms and protect yearly profits.
With lessons from the Trump election, how might other rich companies prioritize future investments, and how might that impact the economy, the middle class, and society?
History of Political Corruption
The sort of political corruption we just saw has gone on for decades, at least since Richard Nixon, but after Reagan it started getting steadily worse. The result has been a huge redistribution of the nation’s wealth — from the middle class to the very top. This wealth transfer was enabled by a tax code that grew from 400 pages to over 4,000, with lots of loopholes to exploit.
The rich are clearly richer, but are they really happier? Recent research has found a direct correlation between money and happiness, up to a point. Interestingly, there seems to be a plateau of about $75,000 where the level of happiness levels off. Clearly, a reset is in order. But sadly, the solution, according to Scott Galloway, could come down to war, famine or violent revolution.
How to Fix Our Broken System?
The biggest problem with our broken political system is corruption from wealthy special interests. That affects not just our health care but also education, housing, immigration, food supply, infrastructure, gun violence, climate change, and more. That’s why Jennifer Lawrence got involved with American Promise, a proposal to unbreak the system and solve the corruption crisis.
