Corporate Behavior and Rising Health Care Costs

Reforming our broken healthcare system, and sadly recovering from the pandemic, depends on fixing our political system and the extreme inequality and corporate greed that makes it so corrupt.

As I’ve learned, this underlies nearly every other issue voters will consider in upcoming elections. Beyond just healthcare and how to deal with a global pandemic, political corruption also affects economic policy, the environment, the judicial system, immigration, religious liberty, racial relations, fair trade, public education, infrastructure, gun safety, and so much more. 

I originally wrote this article to highlight The Corporation, an important 2007 documentary about how the modern corporation behaves in today’s society, and why it’s self-centered behavior can be described like that of a sociopath. I’m republishing today preceded by new information.

UPDATE: The New Corporation is an unfortunately necessary sequel, produced in 2020. It ​reveals how the corporate takeover of society is being justified by slick rebranding of corporations as socially conscious entities. The film looks at their devastating power, from gatherings of corporate elites in Davos and support of ultra-right leaders, to climate change, spiraling inequality, the global pandemic, and racial injustice.

WATCH THE ABOVE VIDEO FIRST — In just 13 minutes, Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich describes how corporate monopolies, portrayed as 21st Century Robber Barons, are able to achieve record profits at the expense of workers and consumers and pay little to no taxes. They have become so dominant that workers and consumers have fewer options for employment and have to accept the wages and prices offered to them. At the same time, worker bargaining power has declined, as fewer are unionized and technologies have made outsourcing easy and cheap. 

The Corporation

If healthcare corporations and insurance companies are seen as “persons,” as the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision says, then we might ask, what sort of persons are they? That’s the question presented in this award-winning documentary, which you can watch below.

The legal requirement and operational principles of a corporation is to serve shareholder investment interests, giving it a highly anti-social “personality.” Corporations are inherently self-interested (profit-driven), often making them amoral, callous and deceitful, even breaching social and legal standards to get their way. And while they can mimic the human qualities of empathy, caring and altruism, corporations don’t suffer from guilt, and they can’t be jailed. So in short, modern corporations behave like psychopaths, and they use their wealth and political clout to avoid taxation, regulation and reform.

“Free-market capitalism” is no longer played on a level playing field, even in healthcare, because large corporations are able to invest in lawyers and paid lobbyists, gain political influence, and craft laws in their favor. They can effectively “buy” elections by directing unlimited funds to political action committees and do that entirely in secret.

The Corporation is a complex and sobering, yet darkly amusing, video documentary that reveals the inner workings of corporations, along with their curious history, controversial impacts and possible futures. Based on Bakan’s best-selling book, ”The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power,” the film has achieved box office success and has won dozens of awards from prestigious festivals around the world. It stands as the top-grossing Canadian feature documentary of all time.

The Corporation includes encounters and interviews with CEOs and top-level executives from a range of industries: energy, pharmaceutical, computer, tire, carpet, sporting goods, public relations, branding, news, advertising, and undercover marketing. It also shares perspectives of as a Nobel-prize winning economist, a corporate spy, and a range of academics, critics, historians and thinkers.

The Corporation helps us understand why we can’t blindly trust “market forces” to control behavior and must instead restore the checks and balances of regulatory oversight, even with criminal penalties when necessary.

The Corporation helps explain why so many U.S. corporations behaved badly and contributed to the global financial crisis during the Bush administration. Apparently some corporate officers even forgot the ethics lessons they learned in kindergarten. They obviously believed in privatizing profits and socializing losses, because they too adopted the same self-serving and psychopathic behavior of the corporation itself. They willingly put both stockholders and society at risk for personal gain. 

Skip to 6:00 for a history, starting with the question, “What is a Corporation?” You can also order the 2-DVD Special Edition version, which includes over 8 hours of excellent extras at www.thecorporation.com.

INTERLOCKING DIRECTORATES

At the beginning of the film, George Bush cited “a few bad apples” as being responsible for bad corporate behavior, but we all know what happens when one bad apple is put into a basket with otherwise good apples. They all go bad. That’s largely what happens with interlocking directorates, which I believe should be illegal but generally are not.

The problem of interlocking directorates comes when members a corporate board also sit on other boards, and they approve each other’s compensation package without sufficient oversight of shareholders. The practice widens the income gap between workers and executive management, but potentially worse is that bad business practices and behaviors of one corporation can quickly infect the others. Like schools of fish, geese and cattle that stampede in one direction following a lead cow, if one corporation increases profits through automation, offshoring, and mass layoffs, others quickly follow, often blindly. Interlocking directorates also allow corporations to influence more political power as a group, which can go against the interests of the public and society as a whole. That’s whey they should be illegal.

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A PSYCHOPATH CHECKLIST

• Self-serving with disregard for the feelings and rights of others
• Lacks conscience or feeling of remorse or guilt
• Unmindful of putting themselves or others at risk
• Extremely organized, secretive and manipulative
• Repetitive misbehavior, deceit and concealment of evidence
• Understands the rules, social mores and laws but disregards them
• Charismatic and charming outer personality, often hiding a nefarious inner personality
• Able to fly under the radar of society by mimicking behaviors that make them appear normal

The behavior of a psychopath and sociopath are similar, but a sociopath is typically disorganized, spontaneous and relatively easy to detect. A psychopath’s behavior, on the other hand, is well planned and concealed.

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From All I really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten:

1. Share everything. No one person has a greater right to use the planet than any other.
2. Play fair. We all know the rules, but are we following them?
3. Don’t hit people. Be aware of how your actions affect others.
4. Clean up your own mess. Put things back where you found them.
5. Take responsibility for your actions. Say you’re sorry if you hurt somebody. Make amends.
6. Don’t take things that aren’t yours. (And adults, don’t cheat, rob or plunder.)
7. Flush. And wash your hands.
8. Indulge. Warm cookies and cold milk are good for you.
9. Live a balanced life. Learn & Think, Draw & Paint & Sing, and Dance & Play & Work.
10. Slow down and Rest. Take a nap every day.
11. When you go out in the world… Watch out for traffic, hold hands and stick together.
12. Be aware and wonder. Remember the Dick-and-Jane books and the first word you learned – the biggest word of all – LOOK.

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“It may actually be worse than you think, said Common Dreams. “We are up against an unprecedented level of organization and funding by a right wing that is more extreme than anything seen in the modern period.”

AMERICA BROKEN: critiquing Capitalism, Healthcare & Politics — As I wrote in this article, “There’s no such thing as Free Market Capitalism without rules governing Property, Monopoly, Contracts, and Bankruptcy. But who makes the rules, and who enforces them?” Capitalism today has been distorted by wide disparities of wealth, influence and opportunity. Our laws and political systems have become rigged against all but the wealthiest among us who can buy influence. And that Extreme Inequality underlies every other political issue today, including health care, education, housing, energy, the environment, and more.

Hillary Clinton on Quarterly Capitalism — Clinton understands this, and in this short (2:46) interview she explains the problem well. Clinton speaks of encouraging long term investments, as opposed to short term speculation. One way to do that is with an investment transaction tax. The short-term pain of such a tax would discourage day trading and dangerous speculation but be insignificant over the long term. 

Dirty Money is a related 6-part NETFLIX documentary series about global greed and corruption. From crippling payday loans to cars that cheat emissions tests, this investigative series exposes brazen acts of corporate greed and corruption.

Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America is a related book by Nancy MacLean. It examines the role of the Koch brothers in co-opting the Republican Party, Christian Evangelists, and White Nationalists to promote a Radical Libertarian agenda to remove regulations and protect the property rights of billionaires. By promoting political polarization and mistrust of our government and institutions today, democracy itself is threatened as power is taken away from the populace and given to a few rich elites. Traditional conservatives should feel angry to learn how masterfully and legally they’ve been duped. If you don’t want to buy and read the book, watch this 58-minute interview with the author.

MacLean’s perspectives are extremely important and timely, because 2018 Trump tax cuts proved to the Koch brothers and other billionaires that Political Investments Have Huge Returns. The Koch’s invested millions on conservative media, conservative ThinkTanks & AstroTurf organizations (American Heritage Society, Cato Institute, American Legislative Exchange Council), conservative judges (through the Federalist Society), and conservative politicians (through campaign finance). Those investments paid off handsomely. With such high returns from political influence investments (>5,000% ROI), there’s almost no other investment that can deliver greater returns. That’s one reason I’ve been warning that 2020 will be the most expensive election ever.

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SO WHAT DO YOU THINK?

Did I get too political? Do you see the connection between corporate behavior and rising healthcare costs? Did the Affordable Care Act give even more power to big pharma and health insurance companies? What will likely happen to healthcare under the Trump administration? Will we ever have universal access to healthcare, or even universal access to health insurance? Should healthcare be a right or a privilege? I encourage comments below.