This graph shows the point at which the efficacy of healthcare in the United States diverged from the systems of its peer and competitor countries like the United Kingdom, Canada, Germany, France and Japan. It shows that at the point when healthcare spending skyrocketed in the United States, the results of the enormous spending began to falter as measured by life expectancy.

Obviously, there were many factors that led to this divergence. But one factor in particular stands out. In 1973, President Nixon pushed through Congress and then signed into law the Health Maintenance Organization Act of 1973, which changed the operating parameters of HMOs and other pre-paid medical plans. Its advocate was Edgar Kaiser, a wealthy California donor and president of Kaiser Permanente.

Prior to the passage of the law, most HMOs had operated as non-profits. The law created an opportunity for corporations to buy HMOs and turn them into profit-making ventures. It was amended several times over the years, but the 1973 Act radically changed the healthcare industry’s focus by putting profits ahead of patients’ needs.

The result is the system we have today in which multi-billion dollar insurance corporations have inserted themselves as paywalls between patients and providers. The insurers’ mission is to extract income from the middle- and working classes and deliver it in the form of profit to the companies’ stockholders and multi-millionaire executives.

In terms of pure economics, private health insurers provide no essential products or services. It’s laughable to call what they do “capitalism.” They operate like criminal rackets holding Americans’ healthcare for ransom. The private insurance system has become a virus that is sucking the wealth out of the U.S. economy. It thrives in the body politic because of the insurers’ cozy financial relationships with powerful Republican members of Congress who are paid to protect this kleptocratic scheme at all costs.