October 2025
Welcome to The Billionaire Bulletin, brought to you by Tax the Greedy Billionaires. Each month, we explore how extreme concentrations of wealth are distorting our economy and eroding our democracy. Join our mailing list to get this newsletter in your inbox every month.
TO MAKE AMERICA HEALTHY AGAIN, GET PRIVATE EQUITY OUT OF HEALTH CARE
Rising health care costs are on everyone’s mind this month as the government remains shut down over an impasse on expiring ACA tax credits. Americans are expecting to see premiums skyrocket, with the average cost for enrollees who require financial assistance potentially rising 136% nationally and as much as 300% in some states. The Congressional Budget Office projects that roughly 4 million more Americans will be uninsured by 2034 If premium tax credits are allowed to expire.
While some conservatives have urged Congress to address this crisis, the White House has outsourced its health care policy to Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s “Make America Healthy Again” (MAHA) movement.
Unfortunately, Kennedy’s theories miss the real drivers of the nation’s health care crisis: billionaire takeover of our health care system and growing inequality.
Americans pay more for health care than other high-income nations but still have a lower life expectancy and higher rates of death and disease. A growing body of research shows that billionaire-backed private equity investment is making things worse.
In the last decade, private equity firms have spent $1 trillion on health care acquisitions but have failed to improve patient outcomes. Now, a new study released in late September from Harvard Medical School researcher Dr. Zirui Song underscores the consequences of billionaire control over our health care system. The study compared patient outcomes from private equity hospitals with patients from a control group of hospitals not controlled by private equity and the disparity was staggering.
Patient death rates rose by 13% in the emergency departments of the hospitals acquired by private equity firms.
Staffing cuts and reduced salaries at the private equity hospitals are among the possible explanations for this deadly increase. These cuts aren’t about lowering prices for patients or maximizing efficiency – they are about maximizing profits for wealthy investors. Last year, a Senate report found that costs for patients and insurers at private equity hospitals were up to 32% higher than in other facilities.
Research has consistently found that wealth inequality is a driver of health disparities. Americans in lower income brackets experience worse self-reported health, higher rates of chronic illness, and considerably shorter life expectancy compared to wealthier individuals, with these gaps persisting or even widening over time. Epidemiological research shows that extreme economic inequality increases stress, reduces social cohesion, and leads to higher rates of mental health conditions and preventable deaths, affecting not only the poor but everyone in society.
To truly make America healthy, policymakers must break up extreme concentrations of wealth by taxing billionaires. Our health depends on it.
HARD TRUTH
Investors bought one-third of single-family residential homes sold in Q2 of 2025, the highest percentage in the last five years. Investors purchased more homes than they sold – at well below the average price. Housing is already a financial struggle for everyday Americans, with half of all renters and almost a quarter of all home-owners cost-burdened by their monthly housing payments. At a moment where housing demand outpaces supply, investors own about 20% of the 86 million single-family homes in the United States and they’re on track to own 40% by 2030.
BILLIONAIRE BLIGHT OF THE MONTH
Tech Billionaire Peter Thiel has a lot on his mind these days. Last week he wrapped up his closed-door lecture series on the potential emergence of the Antichrist. Across the four-part, eight-hour series of speaking engagements, Thiel railed against regulation of AI and other technological advancement as potential marks of the Antichrist, asserting that “in the 21st century, the Antichrist is a Luddite who wants to stop all science.”
While Thiel’s rant sounded like the ramblings of a madman, taxes seemed front of mind amid the end-times doom and gloom. What’s scarier than the Antichrist when you’re in the throes of Biblical Revelation? According to Thiel, “I think the tax rates would be very high.”
WHAT IS THE BILLIONAIRE BULLETIN?
This monthly newsletter aims to highlight the many ways in which extreme wealth concentration threatens our economy, democracy, climate, and more. In each issue, we tackle timely topics by pulling back the curtain and exposing how billionaires are rigging the system against ordinary Americans.
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