LOD: Sick for Justice

The multi-part series in the News & Observer about NC hospitals will make you sick. Today’s part adds the money-in-politics dimension to the profile of heartless institutions with unbelievable profit margins, hiding behind the respectable shield of non-profit charitable service. Rep. Dale Folwell, the Republican House Speaker Pro-Tem, says his effort to cap a sales tax windfall for hospitals went nowhere fast last year. “The reason this bill never got a hearing is because big money bottled it up,” he said. Today’s paper also includes an op-ed on the dangers of turning the health-care management of prison inmates over to for-profit corporations that use political corruption wherever they go to turn state resources into enormous private gain. Not that North Carolina’s non-profit hospitals do much better with prison care; the N&O shows they routinely charge the state three times their actual costs to treat sick inmates. Sure seems like a crime, but who will threaten these smiling hospital managers with a prison term?