JLA

Another big hospital ponzi just filed Chapter 11. In 2018 2 serial grifters & Leonard Green Partners embezzled >$650 million from the Prospect hospital chain Now it's $3-4 billion in the hole One Prospect hospital just flooded AND caught fire TWICE in a single week over Xmas

These Western professors of neoclassical "economics" who boast of having never read Adam Smith or Marx are illustrating exactly what is wrong with their field. They are proud of their ignorance. Their claim to not be "ideological" is in fact the perfect demonstration of their neoliberal ideology. The ruling class always tries to hide the hegemonic ideology that legitimizes its rule by making it seem invisible, natural, even "scientific". These pseudoscientific neoclassical economists are, as development economist Ha-Joon Chang puts it, like "the Catholic clergy in the Middle Ages". They have convinced themselves that only they have the truth, and no one else. But they fail to see how they are simply using a bastardized version of "science" to justify rule by billionaire oligarchs and transnational corporate monopolies, which fund neoclassical economics programs and train people to think in precisely this way. Their pseudoscientific models are based on laughably absurd assumptions, like perfect competition and rational expectations, taking for granted that every individual is a utility-maximizing rational automaton with perfect access to information, and that no externalities exist. As soon as these unrealistic, infantile assumptions are taken away, their models fall apart. But if you dare to challenge their religious fetishization of "science", they will claim that you are the ignorant one -- just like the Catholic clergy in the Middle Ages. There is no such thing as "neutral", non-"ideological" "economics"; it is, has always been, and always will be political economy.

Starting to feel like a lot of research focused on various payment model tweaks etc unwittingly serve as a bit of a distraction from getting us to single payer.