A success story from Los Angeles: "immigrant, doctor, billionaire"...and COVID profiteer?
Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong — the mega-billionaire immigrant doctor who owns the Los Angeles Times and who’s laying off journalists left and right because of “budgetary” issues — just bought an entire hospital to conduct COVID-19 and pandemic research.
Trained as a surgeon, he made his money selling a biotechnology company that manufactured an anti-cancer drug, and he parlayed that into becoming a huge investor into all sorts of profit-driven healthcare technologies and cures. So making money off COVID and other coming pandemics would be a natural activity for him.
“St. Vincent is Los Angeles’ oldest hospital with a storied history of innovation and caring for the poor. St. Vincent was in the center of the storm and the hospital that cared for Los Angelenos during the smallpox pandemic of 1876-77. The legacy of innovation and caring for the poor must continue,” said Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong. “Through the acquisition of this closed campus, we can ensure an ongoing legacy of preparedness against viral threats such as COVID-19. We are pleased to partner with the State of California using St. Vincent again during this time of crisis to contribute to winning the war by serving as the Los Angeles Surge Hospital.”
Patrick Soon-Shiong not a well know character on a national level — hell, most people in Los Angeles don’t know who he is — but he’s one of the richest people in Southern California. Ethnically Chinese, he grew up in South Africa, went to UCLA, made his fortune here in Los Angeles, and is now a medicine, healthcare, and technology oligarch — who owns a newspaper, a post-production company, AI and super-conductor startups, and all sorts of other investments folded under his NantWorks conglomerate.
He recently bought the Los Angeles Times and almost immediately moved the paper’s headquarters out of its historic building across the street from city hall to the outmost edge of the city — right next to LAX airport. That would be like if the New York Times moved its HQ next to the airport in Newark. And within a few weeks of COVID-19 lockdown, his LA Times began laying off journalists and staff — even though as a multi-billionaire he can keep paying their meager media peasant salaries in perpetuity and probably not even notice.
As for the hospital buyout, even probing the deal superficially, it looks like a weird insider deal. Technically, Patrick Soon-Shiong’s private foundation is buying the hospital from a bankrupt company called Verity Health. But Soon-Shiong already held a controlling stake in Verity Health and had plowed a several hundred million into the company. So what’s really happening is that one part of Patrick Soon-Shiong’s empire is taking over a different part of his empire — one that had gone bankrupt.
What makes this thing even more interesting is that Soon-Shiong is effectively taking over functions of the state of California — which had taken over the hospital a month ago to turn into a facility that deal with COVID patients. Now this will happen under a privatized arrangement, which will no doubt allow Soon-Shiong’s sprawling healthcare investment empire to monetize the hospital’s private-public partnership and exploit it for whatever COVID cures and treatments he think he can develop for profit.
The deal shows once again how even on a local level our government has outsourced its functions to private power. I mean, California — which has the highest number of billionaires in American is one of the biggest economies in the world — is so hollowed out that it can’t even test its own population for COVID. Instead it tapped a group of oligarchs and oligarch celebrity, including Tim Cook and Arnold Schwarzenegger, to come up with a plan to lead the way out of California’s “pandemic recession.” This is politics in progressive California.
But coming back to this Patrick Soon-Shiong COVID hospital deal: it feels wrong and off in all sorts of ways — but I don’t expect that anyone will look and investigate it deeply or critically.
I mean, no journalists around here will do it: The billionaire profiting from the deal owns the only newspaper in town. And…he’s laying off journalists even as I write this! So who the hell is gonna look into it? A Soviet immigrant like me with a poor, subsistence-level substack newsletter? Ha! Welcome to the oligarchy!
It reminds me of old timey Los Angeles that you get reading Horace McCoy — where oligarchs ruled and journalists got whacked for asking the wrong questions. And anyway, it’s not like journalism will do much: the only real organized politics around here are oligarchic politics, and so oligarchs get what they want. As for the rest of us, we can complain all we want but nothing will change.
Looking at the way things are developing here in America, I can’t help but think that what America’s political and business elite helped do to Russia in the 1990s was just a dry run for what they ultimately did to their own country. Shows once again that what empire does abroad sooner or later always comes home.
—Yasha Levine
Read more: “Our nativist freakout about China hides the real origin of the coronavirus. It’s political, global, and made in the USA.”
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