Category: Breitbart
Cancer care is becoming another Wall Street extraction industry
Across rural America, families are learning a hard lesson. The biggest threat to their local hospital or cancer clinic no longer comes from distance, workforce shortages, or regulation. It comes from private equity.
Over the past two decades, private equity firms have quietly bought hundreds of cancer clinics, oncology practices, and community hospitals. They promise efficiency and stability. Many communities experience something else: consolidation, higher costs, fewer doctors, and the slow erosion of care. When profit targets fall short, clinics close. Patients travel hours for treatment — or go without it altogether.
The same forces that hollowed out manufacturing towns and family farms are now targeting essential health care.
This shift reflects a deeper failure: treating health care as a financial asset rather than a public obligation.
Private equity follows a familiar playbook. Firms acquire medical practices with borrowed money, cut staffing, increase billing, extract profits, and sell within a few years. That model rewards investors. It fails patients who need long-term care and towns that depend on a single hospital or cancer center.
The collapse of 21st-century oncology shows how destructive this approach can be. After private equity took control, the company expanded rapidly across the Southeast while piling on debt. Pressure to generate revenue intensified. Federal investigators later uncovered widespread abuse, including unnecessary testing and illegal billing. The company paid more than $86 million in fraud settlements to the federal government and patients before filing for bankruptcy.
Entire regions lost access to cancer care with little warning. Investors exited. Patients were left to deal with the fallout.
Rural communities suffer the most. In cities, the loss of a clinic often means longer wait times. In rural America, it can mean the end of cancer care entirely. Patients face long drives, delayed treatment, or impossible choices between health and family obligations.
The same pattern appears in rural hospitals owned by Apollo Global Management through its control of LifePoint Health. After the acquisition, hospitals took on heavy debt. Executives sold real estate to raise cash, cut staffing, reduced services, and closed cancer centers. In New Mexico, state officials opened an investigation after reports that an Apollo-owned hospital denied or delayed cancer care for low-income patients.
RELATED: The hidden hospital scam driving up drug prices, coming to a state near you
amphotora / Getty Images
Defenders of private equity claim these firms rescue independent practices from hospital monopolies. In reality, they replace local control with corporate control.
Doctors lose authority to distant executives who never set foot in the affected communities. The language of independence disguises a transfer of power away from patients and physicians and toward investors.
Conservatives should recognize this for what it is. An elite financial class is extracting wealth from essential local institutions and leaving weaker communities behind. The same forces that hollowed out manufacturing towns and family farms are now targeting essential health care.
Cancer care should not function as a short-term investment. Rural hospitals should not exist to satisfy quarterly return targets. A system that allows this will continue to fail the people who rely on it most.
The answer is accountability, not a government takeover of medicine. Regulators must enforce antitrust laws. Policymakers should strengthen protections that preserve medical judgment from corporate interference. Communities deserve transparency about who owns their hospitals and who controls decisions about their care.
Health care depends on trust and continuity. When financialization dominates cancer care, rural Americans lose both. And once these institutions disappear, rebuilding them proves far harder than protecting them in the first place.
Cameraman Catches Moment Grenade Hits Congresswoman, Explodes On Head
‘We’re arriving at the emergency room’
WATCH NOW: ICE Agent Involved in Shooting Previously Dragged 300FT, Hospitalized by Illegal Migrant Driver Last Year
According to a New York Post report, the ICE agent who opened fire in Minneapolis on Wednesday has a grim recent history:
Obama judge derails probe into Letitia James
A federal judge who was appointed by former President Barack Obama issued an order on Thursday disqualifying John Sarcone as the U.S. attorney for the Northern District of New York.
Adding insult to injury, Judge Lorna Schofield then tossed the subpoenas Sarcone’s office issued in August to state Attorney General Letitia James regarding civil cases brought by the Empire State against President Donald Trump and the National Rifle Association.
‘It acts without lawful authority.’
Sarcone has been investigating whether James’ office violated the president’s civil rights and the rights of others.
Attorney General Pam Bondi appointed Sarcone as interim U.S. attorney for NDNY on Feb. 28. His 120-day term began in earnest on March 1.
Since Sarcone was neither formally nominated by the president nor confirmed by the Senate, it was left up to a panel of judges overseeing the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of New York to appoint an attorney for the district at the end of Sarcone’s term, just one month after he was threatened with a knife, allegedly by an illegal alien.
RELATED: The courts are running the country — and Trump is letting it happen
Photo by Michael M. Santiago/Getty Image
Although the panel declined to grant Sarcone a permanent appointment, Bondi designated him special attorney and first assistant U.S. attorney, effectively keeping him in charge of the office.
Schofield claimed in her ruling on Thursday that Sarcone was not lawfully serving as the acting U.S. attorney for the NDNY as his appointment supposedly “violates the [Federal Vacancies Reform Act] and the statutes governing U.S. Attorney appointments.”
“When the Executive branch of government skirts restraints put in place by Congress and then uses that power to subject political adversaries to criminal investigations, it acts without lawful authority,” wrote Schofield.
She suggested further that because Sarcone “used authority he did not lawfully possess to direct the issuance of the subpoenas, the subpoenas are quashed.”
A spokesperson from James’ office said in a statement obtained by CNN, “This decision is an important win for the rule of law, and we will continue to defend our office’s successful litigation from this administration’s political attacks.”
Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!
How the right got Dave Chappelle wrong
For years, Dave Chappelle has been treated as a kind of honorary dissident on the right. Not because he ever pledged allegiance, but because he irritated the correct people. He mocked pronouns, needled sanctimony, and refused to bow. That was enough. In a culture addicted to easy binaries, irritation became endorsement. Chappelle was recast as the anti-woke jester, the last free man in a room full of rules.
“The Unstoppable…” puts an end to that fantasy.
The right’s long flirtation with Chappelle rested on a misunderstanding. He was never an ally. He was a contrarian whose targets briefly overlapped with conservative concerns.
As the Netflix special begins, Chappelle emerges on stage wearing a jacket emblazoned with Colin Kaepernick’s name across the back, a symbol doing more work than most monologues. It is declarative. Kaepernick, a distinctly mediocre quarterback who parlayed a declining football career into a lucrative role as a full-time political brand, has long functioned more as an abstraction than as an athlete. His protest became performative, his grievance a commodity, his kneel a credential. Before a word is spoken, the audience is told where power, sympathy, and grievance will be placed. Identity is not the backdrop. Quite the opposite. It’s the billboard.
Black and white
From there, the special settles into a familiar groove. Race becomes the organizing principle, the master key, the lens through which every topic is filtered and fixed. America is again framed as a racist hellscape, a uniquely cruel experiment, a place where whiteness looms as a near-mythical menace.
This is not observation so much as obsession. The fixation risks alienating white viewers almost immediately. Some in the audience likely sense it. Others — liberal self-flagellators by instinct — laugh along anyway, even as they become the punch line of nearly every joke.
Chappelle takes aim at Elon Musk, at Trump, at the culture of DOGE-era absurdity, but the jokes rarely travel. They circle. Musk becomes less a human eccentric and more a symbol of tech-bro whiteness run amok. Trump is reduced to a prop, wheeled on whenever the set needs a familiar villain. That might be forgivable — useful, even — if the material pushed somewhere unexpected. It doesn’t. For a comedian of Chappelle’s ability, too much of the set feels curiously unambitious.
Left hook
The most telling moment comes in Chappelle’s account of Jack Johnson. Johnson, the first black heavyweight champion, endured explicit racism. That history is real. That is not in dispute. What is striking is how Chappelle treats that history. Johnson becomes less a man of his time and more a stand-in for black people in the present, besieged by the same “demonic white man.”
And so Chappelle conflates Johnson’s struggles with with the lives of rappers T.I. and the late Nipsey Hussle — and celebrates all three heroes for opposing white America.
As BlazeTV host Jason Whitlock recently posted on X:
This comedy special exposes [Chappelle] as highly controlled opposition, the ultimate plant, a fraud. He pretends to be a fearless speaker of truth to power. It’s laughable. No one with a brain can witness the Charlie Kirk assassination and then argue/suggest that Nipsey Hussle, T.I., and Jack Johnson were/are the real rebels, the real threats to American hegemony. Dave quoted Jack Johnson as saying his life was dedicated to the pursuit of pleasure. He was a boxer with the worldview of a modern gangsta rapper.
Some kings?
And then comes Chappelle’s praise of Saudi Arabia.
Not cautiously. Not ironically. He recounts performing at a comedy festival in Riyadh, openly boasting about the size of the paycheck. He describes feeling freer speaking there than in the United States. Freer. In a society where speech is monitored, dissent is criminalized, and punishment still includes public canings and amputations.
The audience laughs on schedule, applauding with the enthusiasm of trained sea lions. I found myself wondering why.
There is something almost surreal about hearing a man who has spent years describing America as uniquely oppressive extol the virtues of a monarchy where speech is tolerated only when it is toothless. The contradiction is never addressed. It simply floats past, buoyed by bravado and bank balance.
This isn’t hypocrisy in the cheap sense. It is something more revealing — and easier to miss because Chappelle is such a gifted orator. His moral compass isn’t anchored to freedom, but to grievance. America is condemned because it fails to live up to an ideal. Saudi Arabia is praised because it pays well and demands little beyond discretion.
It would be easier if “The Unstoppable…” were simply bad. It is not. Chappelle remains a master of timing. His cadence still carries. The problem is less talent than trajectory.
RELATED: Dave Chappelle faces fierce backlash over criticism of US while performing in Saudi Arabia
Photo by Arturo Holmes/Getty Images
Punching inward
What once felt dangerous now feels dutiful. What once cut across power now reinforces a different orthodoxy. Chappelle no longer punches up or down so much as inward, tightening his world until everything is interpreted through race alone.
The right’s long flirtation with Chappelle rested on a misunderstanding. He was never an ally. He was a contrarian whose targets briefly overlapped with conservative concerns. When he mocked trans men in women’s sports, it landed during a moment of peak absurdity, when the subject was everywhere and ripe for satire. It was easy. It was funny. But it was never a statement of allegiance.
“The Unstoppable…” makes that clear. The jacket, the Johnson parable, the Saudi sermon, the relentless racial framing — all of it points in the same direction.
Comedy, at its best, unsettles everyone. It exposes what our certainties conceal. In this special, Chappelle appears more interested in confirming his own.
Unstoppable, perhaps. But no longer subversive.
