Where’s All the Media Coverage about Price Gouging?

Fueling inflation, insurance companies charge 24% more just because, and Big Oil just posted $40 billion in quarterly profits

Stories and articles on the cost of living crisis are everywhere — as they should be. These are unfortunately really tough economic times for too many. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again, ‘cost of living crisis’ is a very dystopian string of words. In 2022 late-stage capitalism, even in modern nations, ever-increasing numbers of people are sliding into poverty as it ‘costs too much to live.’

In a truly open society with a free press operating in the — I hate this term — marketplace of ideas, there would be regular discussion and debate about the shortcomings of unfettered capitalism, private wealth accumulation, and how to design better economies that could sustainably meet human needs rather than shareholder value maximization. But that’s fantasy land.

At a minimum, our press would be directing proportionate amounts of questioning and anger at one of the main culprits of inflation: corporate price gouging.

They’d be discussing the actions taken in history, like Nixon’s price freezes, and all the options to curb insane corporate greed would be talked about and explored.

Instead, most of the media is focused on how to discipline labor, reduce the purchasing power of wages, and cut government spending while Biden can’t even commit to a windfall tax, let alone really tackle the out-of-control and destructive price hikes.

The Lever recently did some great reporting on the health insurance industry that has been getting larger and larger portions of its profits from government spending due to the Affordable Care Act — aka Obamacare — but still turns around and charges higher fees to the public while often outright denying care.

The whole ACA saga is a sad train wreck. I was too young of an apolitical teenager to have known what was going on or how it would end up, but I like to believe that I would’ve seen this horror show coming if it was happening today.

The Obama Administration basically sat down with the private health insurance industry to implement a right-wing think tank Heritage Foundation private health insurance scheme that would dump government money on those same insurers while dressing up the whole thing as providing affordable and expanded coverage.

Twelve years later, as health insurance companies report record profits, the opposite has happened: The nation’s major health insurance companies are receiving most of their money from the government, they just jacked up prices by double digits, and nearly half of the country is now underinsured or uninsured. — David Sirota

Again, it should have been obvious that would happen. The same is now happening with Medicare and the diabolically named Medicare Advantage. Ask many seniors and the government-run coverage they get from Medicare is some of the best insurance they’ve ever had. Americans don’t want to see it destroyed.

But private insurers and right-wing ideologues want to privatize it and have been pushing more and more seniors into privately-run Medicare Advantage plans “with advertisements touting their extra benefits, like gym memberships and dental coverage — without mentioning the plans’ threat of wrongful denials of care.”

In short, it’s another fancy scam.

It’s a similar thing when Democratic candidates like Pete Buttigieg were touting — rather than the wildly popular and common sense Medicare For All — some rubbish called ‘Medicare for those who want it.’

That would inevitably mean President Pete sitting down with insurance company lobbyists, as his hero Obama did, pretending to be pragmatic and helpful but really finding a way to dump all of the oldest, sickest, and most expensive Americans onto a government-run program, which would be inefficient and costly further ‘proving’ the government can’t do anything, while healthy Americans would be forced to pay premiums to private insurers and then get denied coverage when they needed it.

That whole semi-off-topic tangent was simply trying to say that despite getting truckloads of government cash and promising to reduce costs and expand coverage, insurance companies are doing what they always do: pursuing profits. As the Lever reported, “According to new data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, health insurers raised their prices by 24 percent in a single year.”

That’s triple the peak inflation rate in an industry that isn’t directly connected to the cost of oil or been affected much by most other inflationary pressures. They’re simply price gouging.

And while handing that industry billions and billions of dollars a year, the Biden Administration pretends that it has no cards to play.

And the media is ignoring the whole episode.

As the Lever reported, “According to new data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, health insurers raised their prices by 24 percent in a single year.”

The other industry the Lever wrote about was oil and gas. While regular people across the planet are struggling to pay bills, these companies are posting record profits. They’re not just doing pretty well in uncertain economic times. They are doing better than they ever have — ever.

Energy bills are way up, heating bills are way up, gas prices in many places are way up, and these companies are posting record numbers. It is a direct correlation, yet our media will still spin stuff about government spending and increased wages.

In these paragraphs, Jordan Uhl says it all:

ExxonMobil posted its biggest quarter ever on Friday, with nearly $20 billion in earnings during the third quarter of this year. This was a 191 percent increase from the $6.75 billion it raked in during Q3 2021… Chevron reported similarly robust results on Friday. The California-based oil giant’s third-quarter earnings of $11.2 billion were its second-highest quarterly returns ever, nearly double its earnings during Q3 2021… On Thursday, Shell reported $9.5 billion in earnings over the last three months, more than double the $4.1 billion it earned during the same period last year. In its report to investors, the oil and gas giant announced a $4-billion round of stock buybacks, creating yet another windfall for investors and bringing its total buybacks this year to $18.5 billion.

Corporate price gouging is a key piece to the inflation problem the entire globe is experiencing. There’s no reason governments can’t be taking real action to rein in excessive margins and exploitation of the current atmosphere.

One hundred-odd years ago, after the destitution and child labor of the Gilded Age, we decided an important role of the government is to protect the public from the inevitable unfair business practices that come from industries seeking eternally larger returns.

Unfortunately, we’ve completely forgotten the lessons learned during the Robber Baron period and the Great Depression. We’ve somehow been convinced that the state's only role is to facilitate business, rather than regulate and control it.

So, the government gives billions to insurance companies that pocket the cash, charge citizens exorbitant fees, and then deny them coverage. At the same time, during an economic and energy crisis, oil and gas companies are having their best years in over a century while millions struggle to put food on the table.

And the government pretends it has no options.

Then the mainstream media convinces the people that it is true and directs the blame for inflation back on the same struggling citizens who might have gotten a 3% wage increase and a freaking thousand-dollar check eighteen months ago.

Luckily, more and more are turning to independent voices and media.

That will hopefully be an impetus for future change.