room the size of a basketball court, a COVID testing lab took shape. Setting it up gave Joe his first real view of the medical-industrial complex. It wasn’t designed for a crisis; if it was designed for anything, it was to maximize the profits of companies that enjoyed monopoly power. Labcorp and Quest, which were charging the state one hundred sixty dollars for every COVID test and returning the results so slowly that they were useless, were just one example. The companies that made the testing machines were another. The fancy so-called sample-to-answer machines had one big advantage: they
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