It seems to be an oxymoron.

A business that is robbing it's customers blind should be doing great profit-wise, right?

In reality it is a sign of a terminal illness.

In 2001 Enron was defrauding California of billions of dollars. The following year it was bankrupt.

During the housing bubble the financial sector defrauded their customers on an epic scale. They all ended up insolvent and imploded the global economy.

Since the crash the banking sector has continued to commit fraud, but at the same time it's been laying off employees by the tens of thousands.

Wells Fargo was cutting headcount even while stealing from their customers.

Look at the UBS trading floor from 8 years ago, contrasted with one from this year.





However, I don't want to talk about the financial sector today.

I want to talk about the health care industry.



Forget about the subprime mortgage collapse. The health care sector is nursing its own toxic mess, with soaring debt, the analysts say. “As a nation, we have to step up our game and get on top of it; this is a huge issue,” said Chris Oretis, a former Washington lobbyist who now works as executive vice president in the life insurance secondary markets at GWG Holdings.

As industry spending and debt servicing rage out of control, health care is ranked as the No. 1 US “systemic recession risk” in a new report.

Health care fraud, just in Medicare and Medicaid, ranges in the hundreds of billions of dollars.

At the same time over half a million Americans are forced to declare bankruptcy every year because of medical bills. The whole system is built to be abused.



The way it works now, the so-called “providers” (doctors, hospitals) refuse to post the cost of any service, and then charge whatever they feel they can extract, subject to an abstruse and dishonest ceremonial “negotiation” with the insurance company. The result: hospital and insurance executives get paid multi-million dollar salaries, doctors get to drive fine German cars, and the patient gets financially ass-raped, kicked to the curb, and eventually stuffed into the bankruptcy courts.

There is no other industry in which the costs are completely unknown to the customer beforehand. Meanwhile, the prices of services can only be comparable to military defense contractors.

Despite all this fraud and wealth extraction from working-class people, like Enron and the financial industry before it, the health care industry is in deep trouble.



Health-care sector debt has soared 308% since 2009, the depth of the Great Recession which elegantly bypassed the sector. Over the same period, GDP has grown 30%, and overall jobs have grown only 18%. Thus health-care sector debt has grown 10 times faster than GDP and 17 times faster than private-sector jobs, “exceeding multiples of prior finance and energy sector boom-and-bust cycles.”

All that debt, the result of a merger binge, needs to be serviced. That normally means passing along the costs to the customers. However, the costs are already out of control, beyond the ability of many to pay, and crushing the general economy. So passing along the costs of this is not a realistic option.





The math doesn't add up. The greed has been too great. The theft has been too rapacious.

Now the first signs of the inevitable are starting to be seen.



The first murmurs of early trouble may have been detected.

“Companies in the health care sector are starting to lay people off,” said John Burns, CEO of John Burns Real Estate Consulting, an independent research and consulting firm on macro trends, such as the health care and technology sectors, that drive the US housing market...

“It could be like a Lehman Brothers scenario, where a couple of big health care companies take the economy down,” Burns told The Post.

When the next recession hits, which will be soon, the bankruptcies will start.