So that Congress will start to refocus on the American people?

How do we stop the lobbyists?

How do we get big business to reinvest in themselves and
grow their companies?

How do we get hospitals to stop charging $5K a day for a room?

How do we get health insurance companies to stop adding so much to the cost of health care.

How do we get surgical units to stop charging for the surgical room based
on the physician's fee even though the patient is just renting the same room?

Essentially - Why aren't we asking the hospitals to lower their fees? Shouldn't there be a
limit to not-for-profit earnings?

There are a lot of questions that aren't being asked!

Our not-for-profit hospitals are not raking in huge amounts of money, and what they do have in "retained earnings" is re-invested in plant and equipment, not distributed to shareholders or paid in extravagant salaries.

The ridiculous costs are not due to price gouging, but are caused by our for-profit health insurance model, and the huge number of Americans who have no coverage. When uncovered folks show up for care, their costs are shifted to others, resulting in high charges for what would otherwise be low-cost services. Hospitals have to make it up somehow, and that's the only tool they have.

Implement Medicare-for-All and you'll see those problems go away.

Note that there are for-profit hospitals around, mostly cherry-picking the most profitable cases and leaving the rest for their not-for-profit competitors.

would make a lot of problems go away, that is for sure.

But I worked at a hospital, a "non-profit" hospital. And what they did was separate out the parts that make good money, and made it for profit. Like lab and radiology out patient testing. So they have their workarounds. And lot of this is generated by the way the greedy insurance companies operate.

The non-profit hospital I worked for just relocated 3 miles away to a new campus. Out of the poor side of town to an area that is full of insurance covered people. With the promise that they would provide bus service to the new facility for the poor people in the area where they were previously located. That remains to be seen. Cherry picking?

The other hospital in town was a catholic for profit hospital. They had an obligation to cover x amount of medicaid patients. I remember when working in a doctors office and trying to schedule a patient there for surgery and being told that they had already met their "quota" of medicaid patients and would not accept them. Always the so called "bottom line".

My definition of bottom line is people, not $$$$$.

Billionaires benefit from a strong economy. Austerity wrecks the economy.

...we 'might' have politicians who are actually for the people.

However, we see so many 'feathering their own nests' and the nests of larger birds.