Symposium – LPE Project

What’s Value in Health Care? Powerful Companies Make It Hard To Know

Eve Zelickson — Tue, 22 Jul 2025 11:00:00 +0000

This post is part of a series on the corporate consolidation and financialization of health care. Read the rest of the posts here. ** ** ** If you take them at their word, drug companies, medical device and software companies, hospitals, and their investors are committed to providing “value” to patients and the public. Gilead, the infectious disease giant, claims its medication prices “reflect the...

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The Same Script: Value-Based Payment, Managed Care, and Neoliberalism

Eve Zelickson — Tue, 15 Jul 2025 11:00:00 +0000

This post is part of a series on the corporate consolidation and financialization of health care. Read the rest of the posts here. ** ** ** In 2010, the Affordable Care Act (ACA) ushered in a new governing consensus in health care policy. To address persistently high costs and poor outcomes, policymakers sought to break from the “fee-for-service” payment system, which reimburses physicians for...

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Local Electricity and Bottom-up Energy Planning

James Brandt — Mon, 14 Jul 2025 11:00:00 +0000

To build an electric system that meets the needs and opportunities of the 21st century, we need proposals that strengthen public control and improve regulation of Investor-Owned Utilities. Yet on their own, such proposals ignore a fundamental issue: almost all federal, state, municipal, and coop utilities currently operate with the same centralized, top-down planning and system control as Investor Owned Utilities. Unless that changes, public ownership will do little to remove the barriers that now largely block the evolution of decarbonized, resilient, and more equitable electric service.

A Dialysis Duopoly: How Public Funding Entrenched Private Power

Eve Zelickson — Tue, 08 Jul 2025 11:00:00 +0000

This post is part of a series on the corporate consolidation and financialization of health care. Read the rest of the posts here. ** ** ** For the half-million people in the U.S. with kidney failure, survival rests in the hands of two powerful corporations—DaVita and Fresenius. Together, these companies control over 70% of the outpatient dialysis market. But the history of dialysis isn’t a simple...

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State Efforts to Rein in Corporate Medicine

Eve Zelickson — Wed, 02 Jul 2025 11:00:00 +0000

This post is part of a series on the corporate consolidation and financialization of health care. Read the rest of the posts here. ** ** ** Large corporations are increasingly dominating American health care, including physician practices. By 2023, nearly 80% of physicians were employed by for-profit hospitals or other corporate entities. For instance, the health insurance behemoth UnitedHealth...

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Consolidating Care: A Symposium on Medicine and Market Power

Eve Zelickson — Tue, 01 Jul 2025 11:00:00 +0000

This post introduces a series on the corporate consolidation and financialization of health care. Read the rest of the posts here. ** ** ** When Luigi Mangione fatally shot UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson this past December, the internet erupted with declarations of solidarity and anxious calls for condemnation. His vigilante campaign against corporate greed, and subsequent heroization...

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The Tax Struggle and Renewable Power

Elliot Setzer — Mon, 16 Jun 2025 11:00:00 +0000

This post is part of a symposium on Sandeep Vaheesan’s Democracy in Power: A History of Electrification in the United States. Read the rest of the posts here. *** Tax policy has become a key battleground for federal climate policy in the United States, a fact that is especially evident as the Trump administration and its allies in Congress work to terminate much of President Biden’s signature...

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Yardsticking It to the Man, Then and Now

Elliot Setzer — Mon, 09 Jun 2025 11:00:00 +0000

This post is part of a symposium on Sandeep Vaheesan’s Democracy in Power: A History of Electrification in the United States. Read the rest of the posts here. *** In the 1930s, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and like-minded thinkers advanced the idea of publicly owned utilities as a “yardstick” against which private utilities’ performance could be measured. When private utilities fell short...

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From the Vault: LPE & Housing

James Brandt — Thu, 05 Jun 2025 11:00:00 +0000

This post is part of a series highlighting some of our favorite entries from the archives. Read the rest of the posts here. *** Twenty-two percent of renters in the United States currently spend their entire income on rent. More than 770,000 people sleep in homeless shelters or outside – the highest number recorded since tracking began. Meanwhile, one leading landlord industry group boasts that...

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Why Public Ownership?

Elliot Setzer — Tue, 03 Jun 2025 11:00:00 +0000

This post is part of a symposium on Sandeep Vaheesan’s Democracy in Power: A History of Electrification in the United States. Read the rest of the posts here. *** Public ownership has long been a rallying cry for many on the left. Historically, that cry typically focused on the means of production of commodities—for what was capitalism if not a social form organized around private ownership of...

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