More about local healthcare monopolies

Kentucky has a corrupt system in place that grants monopolies to healthcare facilities and allows only 7 hospitals to operate in northern Kentucky, an area with hundreds of thousands of people.

Four of the 7 certificates belong to one operator that has had some questionable practices of late and posted medical disinformation on social media accounts. I've had good luck with individual doctors there, but it's generally not doctors or other healthcare professionals who run hospitals these days.

But I've also found that one of the 7 certificates is held by a facility that abused me when I was in my late teens but now operates under a different name, as if to hide its soiled reputation. It now has a partnership with the local hospital system that has most of the rest of the region's healthcare business. The facility that abused me now gets terrible reviews on Google, including a brand new review that says it serves raw food. There are also other complaints about inedible food and about other things that were the exact same things that were going on over 30 years ago. This includes reports that staffers have been verbally abusing and beating patients and not giving them blankets.

Some folks these days say that facilities like this don't do the bad things they did 30 years ago and that everything is better now. But 30 years ago, they said these facilities did not do the things they did 30 years before that, yet they were still doing them. Everyone thinks everything is better than it was, but it never gets better in places like that.

It was the Republicans that put this monopoly system in place, but now there's a few Republican legislators trying to fix it, while the Democrats keep coming up with flimsy excuses to keep this system in place. So it's a bipartisan problem, and the only thing that's changed is which party is worse. The long and short of it is that the Democrats have become the party of abusive healthcare monopolies. They've become the party of child abuse in general: Since 2020, Democrats have done more to lock children out of school than the Republicans have. When a Democratic legislator in Virginia fought against school closures, party hacks recruited an opponent to run against him. So much for "Vote blue no matter who."