The concept of “socialized medicine” makes many of our readers nervous, your Editorial Team has observed, but recent events surrounding the healthcare provider Optum have got us thinking that instead of the government as a single payer, we’re heading toward a system where a handful of huge companies will have an unbreakable grip on how care is provided and how much we have to pay for it. We can call it, we guess, “corporatized medicine.”

Optum is a recent arrival on the local healthcare scene, with its name appearing on buildings across the Hudson Valley seemingly overnight after its 2022 purchase of CareMount. It now has clinics in the Town of Ulster, New Paltz and Rhinebeck, and several more in Dutchess, Orange, Putnam and Westchester counties.

A subsidiary of the health insurance behemoth UnitedHealthcare, Optum itself is a leviathan: According to reporting last year by the Times Union, the company “has purchased doctors’ offices at an aggressive pace, becoming the country’s largest employer of doctors — one in 10 physicians nationwide now works for Optum, according to industry reporting.”

Back in November, Optum announced that it was dropping several lower-cost health insurance plans from its “in-network” status beginning this month. Those plans included, the Times Union reported, “all Fidelis/Wellcare plans (including its Commercial, Individual Exchange, Medicare Advantage, Dual Special Needs and Medicaid plans) and Cigna/HealthSpring plans,” leaving those with that coverage the option of forking over exponentially more money out of their pockets for care or looking for another provider altogether. While figures for how many in Ulster County weren’t available at press time, estimates are that millions of Medicare and Medicaid recipients will be affected by the move.

The good news? Our representative in the House of Representatives, Pat Ryan, is not having it. Along with several other legislators, in September he introduced the “Patients Over Profits Act.” The legislation would, Ryan stated at the time, “[bar] insurers — including UnitedHealth Group — from buying medical practices through subsidiaries like Optum, and requires existing healthcare conglomerates to separate their insurance and healthcare provider businesses.”

“UnitedHealth has gobbled up our local healthcare practices, creating a monopoly that directly hurts everyone in our community,” Ryan stated. “In their greedy pursuit of profits, they now own the insurance company, they own your doctor, they own the pharmacy and they own the software that processes all of your information — and they use it all to keep prices high and drive quality down. Enough – it’s time to break up UnitedHealth and put you back in control of your own healthcare.”

The bad news? The current makeup of Congress, not to mention the unabashedly pro-big business resident of the White House, makes passage of this bill as impossible as a Jets-Giants Super Bowl next month. (Better luck next year, guys!)

Enjoying a much better chance of success is state-level legislation proposed by Assemblyman Jonathan Jacobson of the district south of Sarahana Shrestha’s 103rd. Jacobson last year, the TU reported, “introduced three bills aimed at curbing monopolistic practices by health insurance companies. Bill A9225 would prohibit companies like Optum and UnitedHealth Group from owning, operating or controlling a health insurance company and a healthcare provider. Bill A9184 would bar a health insurance company from owning pharmacy benefit managers and pharmacies, or any combination of those, while Bill A9099 would require a health insurance company to pay its healthcare provider no more than the lowest amount paid to any other insured provider for the same services.”

All three bills are as of this writing still in committee and nowhere near passage. It’s possible, we suppose, that Gov. Hochul will champion them in her upcoming State of the State address, where governors lay out their agenda for the coming state legislative session. But Hochul is pro-big business herself, so we’ll have to see.

What we’re afraid of is the evolution of a healthcare system where people’s options are even more limited than they are now. After our predictions editorial last week we returned our oft-wonky crystal ball to Temu, but it doesn’t take any kind of scrying device to foresee a healthcare system made up of just a few megacorporations making trillions off of an American public which has little to no alternative to paying more and more for plans that cover less and less. As water (and other things) flows downhill, monopolies inevitably lead to less bang for everybody’s buck. As Frank Zappa sang 50-plus years ago, “You will do as you are told until the rights to you are sold.”

It seems to us that we’re approaching a breaking point for everyday Americans. We are now in a place where basic necessities like healthcare, electric and education are increasingly becoming luxury goods and six out of 10 of us live paycheck-to-paycheck. Even those who had relatively good health insurance plans are these days paying through the nose for diminished benefits. While the stock market, which idiots and liars point to as the be-all and end-all economic measuring stick, is reaching record highs, too many of us can no longer make ends meet.

Where this stops, nobody knows. The beginning of January is supposed to be a time for optimism, but as 2026 finds its sea legs, your Editorial Team finds itself in short supply of this dwindling commodity. We’ll go ahead and call for our government and business leaders to fix this, even though it seems absurd to do so in this time of what one of our team members, expanding a concept of writer Cory Doctorow, calls “the ensh-ttification of America.”

History provides many examples of what can happen when no more blood can be squeezed from the turnip and life becomes unlivable for too many. It seems to us that such a reckoning for us here in Kingston and in the rest of our nation is closer than ever.