For utter shamelessness, it was difficult to top the financial players who had taken control of large swaths of American health care. Having rendered the system vulnerable to the pandemic, they exploited the resulting disaster as an opportunity to extract rescue money. In March 2020, Steward Health Care, a chain of hospitals owned by the private equity giant Cerberus Capital, threatened to close a facility north of Philadelphia unless the state of Pennsylvania handed over $40 million.39 The firm, whose chairman was former vice president Dan Quayle, was in control of $43 billion’s worth of
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