I've long warned of the various nightmare issues in the not-so-distant future, issues that were clearly visible more than a decade ago. My initial warnings on Medicare and what it was going to do to the budget, for example, date back to the 1990s when I was running MCSNet. Even then the Monthly Treasury Statement out of the Federal Government, and what was being reflected back into private firm health insurance data and pricing, was obvious. So was how it was happening: A cornucopia of fraud and wildly-felonious activity in the medical system as a whole, including but not limited to price-fixing, monopolization and other forms of ****ery, all of which had been illegal for the last 100 years.
If you think this is just "recent" corruption you're flat-out insane. In the 1970s the pharmaceutical industry produced a crap-ton of defective DTP vaccine doses and they were administered to kids; some with very little active ingredient and others with far too much. Many kids were injured and some died. The parents sued, the insurers of the pharmaceutical industry withdrew coverage and in response, rather than force the guilty parties to eat responsibility for the harm they did the Federal Government not only provided them with near-blanket immunity on a forward basis (NCVIA, which is how we got "VAERS") they also allowed the manufacturers to change the formula to DTaP rather than fix their quality control problems. Pertussis (whooping cough) was nearly eradicated in the United States prior to this change with fewer than 1,000 annual reported cases. Today there are twenty times as many cases because the new formulation is not sterilizing; that is, it doesn't prevent either getting or transmitting the disease. Not only did the parents of the time not demand blood from the guilty parties they allowed them to change the shot to an easier to make but far less effective formulation, screwing a few hundred thousand Americans over the next forty years and said screwing continues to this day. Exactly none of what happened after that with HIV/AIDS (Bactrim and AZT, to name two specific instances) or Covid (too many to list) would have occurred if heads had been taken as everyone would have remembered the price of attempting to do it again. That failure to hold the government and pharmaceutical firms to account has literally cost more American lives than every single war since 1900 combined.
Remdesivir, which was found worthless in an extremely-large international trial and in fact potentially harmful (it can destroy your kidneys), a drug used in-hospital allegedly for Covid-19 was the largest single drug by dollar volume in hospitals in 2021, amounting to roughly 10% of all in-hospital drug use by dollar amount and exceeding the next three drugs used in hospitals combined. We knew it was wildly toxic, by the way, years earlier as it was tried (and failed) for Ebola. But mass-use under "EUA" for Covid made everyone involved in it very wealthy even though by the data kills people as often as it "helps"; that is, net-net it's a zero at best. It likely killed one of my friends.