TwistedTimes

Saturday, February 15, 2014

BREAKING! FEDS OK BANKS TO DO BUSINESS WITH LEGAL MARIJUANA BUSINESSES

Friday, February 14, 2014

Clean Energy Drives Bill Gates' to Bankruptcy in Texas

Submitted by Charles Kennedy via OilPrice.com,

Bill Gates’ Texas energy company has filed for bankruptcy protection as the depressed power market results in untenable financial losses.

The company, Optim Energy (EnergyCo LLC), owned by a Gates investment fund, filed Chapter 11 Bankruptcy papers on Wednesday for its three power plants in eastern Texas, citing their inability to counter growing losses in the current market.

"The current depressed economic environment of the electric power industry – particularly with respect to coal-fired plants – and the debtors' liquidity constraints have resulted in continuing losses that, simply put, have left the debtors without alternatives," media quoted Optim CEO Nick Rahn as saying in court documents.

According to the documents, Optim has $713 million outstanding under a credit agreement with Wells Fargo, while its total estimated assets are worth less than $500 million. For 2013, Optim recorded revenues of $236 million.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Optim said its executives had failed to obtain consent to borrow more money under a credit facility.

Optim is reportedly planning to sell its coal-fired Twin Oaks plant during the bankruptcy, while the other two plants natural-gas fired.

Optim was founded in 2007, and electricity prices began to fall shortly afterwards, hindering the company’s ability to repay borrowed money.

Reductions in natural gas prices have hit power companies hard over the past several years, and Optim is the third to file for bankruptcy recently, following Dynegy Inc and Edison Mission Energy.

Optim notes in its court filings that the price of electricity in the company’s market area has fallen roughly 40% in the past five years, from around $63.24 per megawatt hour in 2008 to around $38 per megawatt hour by December 2013.

Optim’s owner, ECJV Holdings LLC, is owned by Cascade Investment LLC, an investment vehicle for Gates, the Microsoft Corp. co-founder and the world’s richest person, according to Bloomberg.

Did solar and wind prices contribute to this as well? Perhaps. Read the article below

Wholesale Price of Electricity Drops to $0.00 in Texas, Due to Wind Energy | CleanTechnica http://po.st/WA18cgTexas claims cheapest solar installations, as prices drop nationwide http://bit.ly/1bw78gS

Does this mean Bill Gates' status as the world's richest man is in jeopardy? Don't think so.

Bill Gates’ nuclear company explores molten salt reactors, thorium - The Weinberg Foundation http://bit.ly/1dQvPig
Bill Gates Is Beginning to Dream the Thorium Dream | Motherboard http://bit.ly/1bw7J1T

The US Participation Rate Is At A 35 Year Low: This Is How It Looks Broken Down By State

From Zerohedge.com

After years of being roundly ignored by the mainstream media, and certainly by self-important economists, the issue of labor force participation is suddenly up front and center, especially now that the Fed itself finds itself scrambling to explain the humiliation of hitting its 6.5% unemployment "forward guidance" threshold without proceeding to tighten as it said it would initially when it launched QEternity in December 2012.

Incidentally, we predicted precisely this when we said in December 2012 that "using a simple forecast, based on LTM trends across all key employment metrics reveals something very troubling, for the Fed and stocks that is: the 6.5% unemployment rate will be breached in July 2013!Now granted that is simply idiotic, and there is no way that the US economy could possibly recover that fast, but that is precisely what is implied based on the ongoing collapse in the Labor Force Participation, and the concurrent plunge in the Labor Force Participation rate, which has been the biggest marginal driver for the unemployment rate, far more than the number of people who have jobs, or are unemployed (readers can recreate our calculation on their own in 10 minutes with excel)."

Granted, we were off by six months, but we were spot on about the reason why the unemployment threshold number was hit so quickly, instead of as the Fed has originally predicted, some time in 2015/2016.

So now that absolutely everyone is laser-focused more on the participation print, recently at 35 year lows, than the actual unemployment number which even the Fed has implied is meaningless in the current context, one thing to note is that while the overall number is a blended average across the US, it certainly differs on a state by state basis.

In order to get a sense of which states are the winners and losers in the payroll to participation ratio, we go to Gallup, which conveniently has broken down this number on a far more granular basis.

Gallup finds that Washington, D.C., had the highest Payroll to Population (P2P) rate in the country in 2013, at 55.7%. A cluster of states in the Northern Great Plains and Rocky Mountain regions -- North Dakota, Nebraska, Minnesota, Wyoming, Iowa, Colorado, and South Dakota -- all made the top 10. West Virginia (36.1%) had the lowest P2P rate of all the states.

As Gallup explains:

Gallup's P2P metric tracks the percentage of the adult population aged 18 and older that is employed full time for an employer for at least 30 hours per week. The differences in P2P rates across states may reflect several factors, including the overall employment situation and the population's demographic composition. States with large older and retired populations, for example, would have a lower percentage of adults working full time. West Virginia and Florida -- both in the bottom 10 -- have some of the largest proportions of older residents, with more than half of each state's adult residents older than 50 (52.9% and 51.5%, respectively), and both states rank in the bottom 10 states on the P2P index. Regardless of the underlying reason, however, the P2P index provides a good reflection of a state's economic vitality.

Of course, this now defunct demographic explanation does not account for the fact that within the US labor force, the number of people employed aged 55 and over has just hit a record high, as it defeats the demographic explanation. So while one should ignore the rationalization, one should certainly be aware of which states skew the participation distribution on the high and low side.

Mapped, the data looks as follows:

The natural derivative of the participation rate is the underemployment rate in any one given state. Here we learn the following:

As with Payroll to Population rates, states in the Midwest -- including North and South Dakota, Minnesota, Nebraska, and Iowa -- were among those with the best underemployment rates in 2013.

Gallup's U.S. underemployment rate combines the percentage of adults in the workforce that is unemployed with the percentage of those working part time but looking for full-time work. While P2P reflects the relative size of the population that is working full time for an employer, the underemployment rate reflects the relative size of the workforce that is not working at capacity, but would like to be.

And guess which states were by far the worst offenders when it comes underemployment:

California and Nevada have the highest percentages of their workforces not working at desired capacity. Their rates are about twice those of states at the other end of the spectrum, such as North Dakota (10.1%). Other states hard hit by the recession and declining housing market, including Florida and Arizona, rank among the states with the highest underemployment rates.

Hold on, hold on... Wasn't it an age issue? Perhaps, instead, as this confirms using the relatively young western states it is a, gasp, ability and/or desire to work issue. Apparently that is precisely that case.

This is also what Gallup's conclusion shows:

North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Iowa, and Minnesota ranked in the top 10 states on P2P rates in 2013, and in the bottom 10 for underemployment, as well as in the top 10 on Gallup's Job Creation Index, highlighting the strong job markets in the Midwest.

In contrast, Mississippi, Florida, New Mexico, Hawaii, Michigan, and North Carolina ranked in the bottom 10 states on P2P rates, and are among the states with the highest underemployment rates. There is more overlap between the top 10 P2P states and low underemployment states than there is among the bottom 10 P2P states and high underemployment states on the two measures.That is mainly because many of the states with low P2P rates also have low workforce participation rates. They still have much room for both job growth and labor force mobilization.

Indeed they do, and since neither CA nor NV have a demographic problem, one can finally turn off the perpetually wrong rhetoric about a demographic crunch. Instead, one needs to structurally address the supply and demand sides of the labor market, because it is this that the US has a massive problem with. Far more so than even an aging workforce, which incidentally has been a boon to the unemployment rate as it is mostly workers aged 55 and older who have been hired over the past 5 years.

Housing Bubble? Foreclosure Starts SUDDENLY Jump 57% in California

Wolf Richter www.testosteronepit.com www.amazon.com/author/wolfrichter

From Federal-Reserve-fueled bubble to debilitating return to reality – reality being a financial calamity – to Federal-Reserve-hyper-fueled bubble: that’s the US housing market over the last ten years. There are many places around the country, including some cities in Silicon Valley, where home values are now higher than they were at the peak of the last bubble. Of course, no one at the Fed or in government calls it “bubble.” They’re talking about the housing “recovery.”

But the excesses and speculators are back, and private equity funds and highly leveraged REITs are all over it, buying up every single-family home in sight, and now Wall-Street-engineering firms have come up with a new and improved contraption, a synthetic structured security that on its polished surface looks like that triple-A rated mortgage-backed toxic waste that helped blow up the banks. But this time, it’s different. The securities are backed by sliced and diced rental payments from single-family homes that are, hopefully, rented out [read.... Another Exquisitely Reengineered Frankenstein Housing Monster].

So wither this “recovery?”

Foreclosure filings – default notices, scheduled auctions, and bank repossessions – suddenly jumped 8% to 124,419 in January across the nation, according to RealtyTrac. Which left some people scratching their heads. A mild uptick was expected after the holidays, but 8%? And what about the polar vortices – weren’t they supposed to have slowed things down to a crawl?

OK, foreclosure filings were still down 18% from a year earlier, the 40th month in a row that they declined on an annual basis. But it was the smallest annual decline since September 2012. And the 8% jump from December was the largest such increase since May 2012. Crummy as they were, these national averages covered up some, let's say, interesting phenomena in a number of states.

“The sharp annual increases in some states shows that many states are not completely out of the woods when it comes to cleaning up the wreckage of the housing bust,” said RealtyTrac VP Daren Blomquist. “The foreclosure rebound pattern is not only showing up in judicial states like New Jersey, where foreclosure activity reached a 40-month high in January, but also some non-judicial states like California....

Ah, my beloved state of California. Housing has been booming, and prices in coastal areas have been soaring – along with rents, to the point thatmini-rebellions are breaking out. In this hyped and glorified housing market where the Big Money rules and where first-time buyers have been shoved aside unceremoniously, where foreclosure starts in 2013 had plunged 60% from 2012, and had declined year-over-year for 17 months in a row, or with the exception of five months, had declined four years in a row, well, in this wondrously recovered housing market, foreclosures starts in January suddenly jumped 57%.

It’s not just in California. Foreclosure starts rose 10% from December to hit 57,259 properties across the country. That they on average were still down 12% from a year earlier obscured major annual increases in certain individual states, and not just in one or two, like us crazies out here in California, but in 22 states! And California with its 57% jump in foreclosure starts now suddenly seems tame: In New Jersey, they soared 79%, in Connecticut 82%, and in Maryland 126%!

The cynic in me says the sudden and dizzying jump in foreclosure starts, not only in California but in much of the country, must be some kind of data problem. Maybe RealtyTrac’s computers got hacked by some evildoer who was short the housing market or something. But when I contacted RealtyTrac to request permission to republish the chart, there was no word of a retraction, though this would have been a good opportunity, and so the numbers hold.

Maybe foreclosure starts in February and March will somehow, miraculously, plunge and return to trend. Maybe January was just a fluke. But that may be wishful thinking. Instead, it could be the indication of a turning point of sorts, like some of the other indications we’ve already observed, and maybe the strange sound that we’re hearing out there is the hot air hissing out of this whole construct, so carefully inflated by the Fed, and so assiduously taken advantage of by private equity funds and other Wall Street outfits with access to the Fed’s nearly free money.

Meanwhile, my beloved state of California, whose $2 trillion economy is the eight largest in the world ahead of Italy and Russia, has a new problem: it’s awash in cash. It’s projecting multi-billion dollar surpluses for years to come. The feeding frenzy in Sacramento is a sight to behold. Read....California MUST Have Magnificent, Endless Bubbles in Housing, Stocks, And IPOs – Or Go Broke Again

Is there a housing bubble in California?

Thursday, February 13, 2014

The Banker Commodity Cartel: Koch, JP Morgan Chase, and Goldman Sachs

The story of how JPMorgan, Goldman and the rest of the Too Big To Fails and Prosecutes, cornered, monopolized and became a full-blown cartel - with the Fed's explicit blessing - in the physical commodity market is nothing new to regular readers: to those new to this story, we suggest reading of our story from June 2011 (over two and a half years ago), "Goldman, JP Morgan Have Now Become A Commodity Cartel As They Slowly Recreate De Beers' Diamond Monopoly." That, or Matt Taibbi's latest article written in his usual florid and accessible style, in which he explains how the "Vampire Squid strikes again" courtesy of the "loophole that destroyed the world" to wit: "it would take half a generation – till now, basically – to understand the most explosive part of the bill, which additionally legalized new forms of monopoly, allowing banks to merge with heavy industry. A tiny provision in the bill also permitted commercial banks to delve into any activity that is "complementary to a financial activity and does not pose a substantial risk to the safety or soundness of depository institutions or the financial system generally."Complementary to a financial activity. What the hell did that mean?... Fifteen years later, in fact, it now looks like Wall Street and its lawyers took the term to be a synonym for ruthless campaigns of world domination."

Some key excerpts:

Today, banks like Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs own oil tankers, run airports and control huge quantities of coal, natural gas, heating oil, electric power and precious metals. They likewise can now be found exerting direct control over the supply of a whole galaxy of raw materials crucial to world industry and to society in general, including everything from food products to metals like zinc, copper, tin, nickel and, most infamously thanks to a recent high-profile scandal, aluminum. And they're doing it not just here but abroad as well: In Denmark, thousands took to the streets in protest in recent weeks, vampire-squid banners in hand, when news came out that Goldman Sachs was about to buy a 19 percent stake in Dong Energy, a national electric provider. The furor inspired mass resignations of ministers from the government's ruling coalition, as the Danish public wondered how an American investment bank could possibly hold so much influence over the state energy grid.

...

The motive for the Kochs, or anyone else, to hoard a commodity like oil can be almost beautiful in its simplicity. Basically, a bank or a trading company wants to buy commodities cheap in the present and sell them for a premium as futures. This trade, sometimes called "arbitraging the contango," works best if the cost of storing your oil or metals or whatever you're dealing with is negligible – you make more money off the futures trade if you don't have to pay rent while you wait to deliver.

So when financial firms suddenly start buying oil tankers or warehouses, they could be doing so to make bets pay off, as part of a speculative strategy – which is why the banks' sudden acquisitions of metals-storage companies in 2010 is so noteworthy.

These were not minor projects. The firms put high-ranking executives in charge of these operations. Goldman's acquisition of Metro was the project of Isabelle Ealet, the bank's then-global commodities chief. (In a curious coincidence commented upon by several sources for this story, many of Goldman's most senior officials, including CEO Lloyd Blankfein and president Gary Cohn, started their careers in Goldman's commodities division.)

Then there are the political connections:

In 2010, a decade after the Rich pardon, Holder was attorney general, but under Barack Obama, and two Rich-created firms, along with two banks that have been major donors to the Democratic Party, all made moves to buy up metals warehouses. In near simultaneous fashion, Goldman, Chase, Glencore and Trafigura bought companies that control warehouses all over the world for the LME, or London Metals Exchange. The LME is a privately owned exchange for world metals trading. It's the world's primary hub for determining metals prices and also for trading metals-based futures, options, swaps and other instruments.

"If they were just interested in collecting rent for metals storage, they'd have bought all kinds of warehouses," says Manal Mehta, the founder of Sunesis Capital, a hedge fund that has done extensive research on the banks' forays into the commodities markets. "But they seemed to focus on these official LME facilities."

The JPMorgan deal seemed to be in direct violation of an order sent to the bank by the Fed in 2005, which declared the bank was not authorized to "own, operate, or invest in facilities for the extraction, transportation, storage, or distribution of commodities."The way the Fed later explained this to the Senate was that the purchase of Henry Bath was OK because it considered the acquisition of this commodities company kosher within the context of a larger sale that the Fed was cool with – "If the bulk of the acquisition is a permissible activity, they're allowed to include a small amount of impermissible activities."

What's more, according to LME regulations, no warehouse company can also own metal or make trades on the exchange. While they may have been following the letter of the law, they were certainly violating the spirit: Goldman preposterously seems to have engaged in all three activities simultaneously, changing a hat every time it wanted to switch roles. It conducted its metal trades through its commodities subsidiary J. Aron, and then put Metro, its warehouse company, in charge of the storage, and according to industry experts, Goldman most likely owned some metal, though the company has remained vague on the subject.

If you're wondering why the LME would permit a seemingly blatant violation of its own rules, a good place to start would be to look at who owned the LME at the time. Although it eventually sold itself to a Hong Kong company in 2012, in 2010 the LME was owned by a consortium of banks and financial companies. The two largest shareholders? Goldman and JPMorgan Chase.

Humorously, another was Koch Metals (2.32 percent), a commodities concern that's part of the Koch brothers' empire. The Kochs have been caught up in their own commodity-manipulation schemes, including an episode in 2008, in which they rented out huge tankers and sed them to store excess oil offshore essentially as floating warehouses, taking cheap oil out of available supply and thereby helping to drive up energy prices. Additionally, some banks have been accused of similar oil-hoarding schemes.

And then there is of course Blythe, who is now looking for a new job precisely as a result of the cartel story:

Chase's own head of commodities operations, Blythe Masters – an even more famed Wall Street figure, sometimes described as the inventor of the credit default swap – admitted that her company's warehouse interests weren't just a casual thing. "Just being able to trade financial commodities is a serious limitation because financial commodities represent only a tiny fraction of the reality of the real commodity exposure picture," she said in 2010.

Loosely translated, Masters was saying that there was a limited amount of money to be made simply trading commodities in the traditional legal manner. The solution? "We need to be active in the underlying physical commodity markets," she said, "in order to understand and make prices."

We need to make prices. The head of Chase's commodities division actually said this, out loud, and it speaks to both the general unlikelihood of God's existence and the consistently low level of competence of America's regulators that she was not immediately zapped between the eyebrows with a thunderbolt upon doing so. Instead, the government sat by and watched as a curious phenomenon developed at all of these new bank-owned warehouses, in the aluminum markets in particular.

Finally, the big picture:

[T]he potential for wide-scale manipulation and/or new financial disasters is only part of the nightmare that this new merger of banking and industry has created. The other, perhaps even darker problem involves the new existential dangers both to the environment and to the stability of the financial system. Long before Goldman and Chase started buying up metals warehouses, for instance, Morgan Stanley had already bought up a substantial empire of physical businesses – electricity plants in a number of states, a firm that trades in heating oil, jet fuels, fertilizers, asphalt, chemicals, pipelines and a global operator of oil tankers.

How long before one of these fully loaded monster ships capsizes, and Morgan Stanley becomes the next BP, not only killing a gazillion birds and sea mammals off some unlucky country's shores but also taking the financial system down with them, as lawsuits plunge the company into bankruptcy with Lehman-style repercussions? Morgan Stanley's CEO, James Gorman, even admitted how risky his firm's new acquisitions were last year, when he reportedly told staff that a hypothetical oil spill was "a risk we just can't take."

The regulators are almost worse. Remember the 2008 collapse happened when government bodies like the Fed, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and the Office of Thrift Supervision – whose entire expertise supposedly revolves around monitoring the safety and soundness of financial companies – somehow missed that half of Wall Street was functionally bankrupt.

Now that many of those financial companies have been bailed out, those same regulators who couldn't or wouldn't smell smoke in a raging fire last time around are suddenly in charge of deciding if companies like Morgan Stanley are taking out enough insurance on their oil tankers, or if banks like Goldman Sachs are properly handling their uranium deposits.

"The Fed isn't the most enthusiastic regulator in the best of times," says Brown. "And now we're asking them to take this on?"

Read the full story here (Rolling Stone link), or alternatively for those curious, here is a presentation highlighting all the key aspects of the aluminum price manipulation story by the big banks.

Rockefeller Medicine

Greed + Cartels = U.S. Sickcare/ObamaCare

February 13, 2014

Sickcare/ObamaCare is fundamentally broken at every level.
The incremental nature of change makes it difficult for us to notice how systems that once worked well with modest costs have transmogrified into broken systems that cost a fortune. Exhibit # 1 is higher education: 40 years ago, four-year public universities were affordable and two-year community colleges were almost free. Now students have to borrow $1 trillion to pay for the exorbitant privilege of higher education.
And no, the difference isn't that states don't provide the same funding--the difference is costs have soared while the yield on the investment has plummeted. Please read:
The Mafia State of Mind
Our Two Most Onerous Taxes: College Tuition and Healthcare Insurance
Our Middleman-Skimming Economy
America's Make-Work Sectors (Healthcare and Higher Education) Have Run Out of Oxygen
Longtime correspondent Ishabaka (an M.D. with 30+ years experience in primary care and as an emergency room physician) responded to this article with an insider's account of what happens when greed and cartels take over healthcare.After reading What's wrong with American hospitals?, a scathing deconstruction of for-profit healthcare, Ishabaka submitted this commentary:
I could have told you what was wrong with our hospital system by 1989 - nobody would listen to me back then.
Up til the '70's, almost all hospitals in the United States were not for profit COMMUNITY HOSPITALS. They were LOCAL. The Board of Directors was made up of some senior doctors, maybe the head nurse, and various other prominent local businessmen and professionals. Others (mostly Catholic), were run as non-profits by religious orders. A very few, mostly very small hospitals were for profit, usually owned by a group of doctors, or even one doctor.
The mission of these community hospitals was to provide for the LOCAL COMMUNITY - one and all. Payment was various - private insurance, Medicare, Medicaid, self pay - and the idea was to collect just enough money to keep the hospital going, and provide care for the poor who had no money to pay. If your grandma got bad care - you could go - in person - to the local, say, banker, on the Board of Directors, and tell him - and he would CARE.
THIS SYSTEM WORKED, and kept costs DOWN. Remember, the hospital just needed enough money to stay in the black. Often local wealthy people would will money to the hospital in which they had been cared for.
In the '80's - there was the arrival of the for-profit cartels - and I use the world cartels specifically - these were run by people with the sociopathic Goldman Sachs type mentality - their sole goal was to acquire huge sums of money for themselves, their hospital directors, and their SHAREHOLDERS. They used a typical sneaky technique - they'd come into town, and tell the locals they could run the hospital much cheaper, because of their economy of scale. People believed this, and the cartels bought out most of the community hospitals.
I worked at one such for-profit hospital and had a 21-year old indigent man come in who'd been struck by a car while walking, and was rapidly bleeding to death. The hospital administrator refused to open the operating room, even though I had a surgeon right there, willing and able to operate for free to save this young man's life. The surgeon threw a fit, and he was a big wheel at the hospital and the administrator backed down - otherwise I firmly believe the young man would have died. This was LEGAL back then, before the EMTLA law was passed because similar abuses were rampant NATIONWIDE.
Around this time, the administrators of the remaining community hospitals found out the administrators of the for-profit hospitals were making tens of times their salaries - and bonuses based on profits - and started demanding similar salaries and bonuses based on PROFITS - a contradiction of the old concept of community hospitals (the article does touch on this).
How do you increase hospital profits? Number one - avoid any care for the poor you can weasel out of. Number two - cut staff to the bone and beyond (one of hospital's biggest expenses). Most American hospitals now have UNSAFE nurse to patient ratios because of this.
As far as patient care goes, nurses are the most important people in hospitals. I know of one lady who DIED while in a monitored bed, and wasn't found dead until several hours later due to the criminally low nursing staff ratio in a hospital I worked in. I HAD complained about the dearth of nurses, and was threatened with the loss of my job. Another side effect of this is, nursing in hospitals has become unbearable for nurses who really cared about their patients - many good hospital nurses have left hospital work for other fields. The results are appalling.
I saved the life of a patient an unqualified, under-educated nurse gave the wrong medicine to - a medicine that IMMEDIATELY MAKES YOU STOP BREATHING, because it was cheaper for the hospital to hire her than a knowledgeable and experienced nurse. The medicine is pancuronium bromide, if you want to Google it. The nurse didn't know one of the effects was cessation of breathing - this is Pharmacology for Nurses 101, this drug is used all day long in every operating room in America (where doctors WANT patients under anesthesia to stop breathing, and put them on breathing machines during the surgery - which is very safe if done correctly).
I could go on and on. Simple things, like the instruments you use to suture cuts - community hospitals used to buy Swiss or German made ones that were of the finest quality, sterilize and re-use them over and over. This changed to disposable instruments that sometimes literally fell apart in my hands. Bandage tape that didn't stick, instead of quality Johnson and Johnson tape - anything to save a buck.
It is not getting better, it is getting worse. The nurses I know tell me hospitals are cutting staff even MORE now in preparation for Obamacare.
I will end with a story that illustrates the difference between Old School and New School hospital administrators.
I had the pleasure of working five years in a real community hospital. One of the senior administrators (R.I.P.) was a gentleman who'd made his fortune in the grocery business. In his late 80's, he would arrive at the emergency department entrance every morning between seven and eight am, and proceed to walk throughout the hospital. He would ask various and sundry staff how they were getting along - everyone from janitors to senior physicians. If something was amiss - HE RECTIFIED THE SITUATION. Tragically, this hospital was bought out, and is now part of a chain.
I had the displeasure of working in a "community" (really for-profit) hospital with a middle aged administrator who NEVER set foot outside his office or conference rooms - he NEVER appeared in the (very large and busy) emergency department once. This was in the early 90's, and one year it was revealed that his compensation was $600,000 - and a brand new Lexus as a "performance bonus". He was on the golf course by three pm every single day. That was the hospital where the woman who was being "monitored" (alarms and all that) was found very cold and dead after a delay of who knows how many hours.
Thank you, Ishabaka, for telling it like it really is. Needless to say, ObamaCare (the Orwellian-named Affordable Care Act--ACA) purposefully ignores everything that is fundamentally broken with U.S. sickcare and extends the soaring-cost cartel system, essentially promising to stripmine the taxpayers of however many trillions of dollars are needed to generate outsized profits for the cartels.
Only those with no exposure to the real costs of ObamaCare approve of the current sickcare system. Government employees who have no idea how much their coverage costs, well-paid shills and toadies like Paul Krugman, academics with tenure and lifetime healthcare coverage--all these people swallow the fraud whole and declare it delicious.

Only those of us who are paying the real, unsubsidized cost know how unsustainable the system is, and only those inside the machine know how broken it is at every level. Greed + cartels = Sickcare/ObamaCare. Love your servitude, baby--it's affordable, really, really, really it is.

Refer back to this video and others similar to understand WHY we do EVERYTHING WRONG in healthcare.