I will take any excuse to have my favorite Substack writer on the program and this is a great one! Chris Bray [subscribe to his Subtsack! https://chrisbray.substack.com/] tells us the real reason why Amazon, CVS and Humana are purchasing primary care medical clinics (hint: it’s not because of their deep desire to help humans achieve better health and happiness.

Chris writes:

Incentives Create Trajectories, Corporate Model or, "let's start foregrounding the gleichschaltung"

“You have to love ‘intense coding practices.’ So the emerging model of primary care is a financial game that manipulates billing practices to capture more money from government. The business is resource extraction; the pretext is medical care.

Why?

The federal government spent about $2 trillion a year at the start of the Obama administration, and now spends close to $7 trillion a year. The growth of federal spending looks like this, in a chart from this statistics website, though it leaves off the last few extremely significant growth years:”

Chris also tells us how California fell and offers some poignant, simple and beautiful parenting advice.

What does God say?

We are called to provide care for the body, which was then a new view for religious people. After Pentecost, one of the first jobs assigned to members of the church was to “care for the Greek widows.” The teachings of Jesus lead, in fact, to the first hospitals, founded by the Christian church.

Acts 6:1-7

6 In those days when the number of disciples was increasing, the Hellenistic Jews among them complained against the Hebraic Jews because their widows were being overlooked in the daily distribution of food. 2 So the Twelve gathered all the disciples together and said, “It would not be right for us to neglect the ministry of the word of God in order to wait on tables. 3 Brothers and sisters, choose seven men from among you who are known to be full of the Spirit and wisdom. We will turn this responsibility over to them 4 and will give our attention to prayer and the ministry of the word.”

5 This proposal pleased the whole group. They chose Stephen, a man full of faith and of the Holy Spirit; also Philip, Procorus, Nicanor, Timon, Parmenas, and Nicolas from Antioch, a convert to Judaism. 6 They presented these men to the apostles, who prayed and laid their hands on them.

7 So the word of God spread. The number of disciples in Jerusalem increased rapidly, and a large number of priests became obedient to the faith.”

There is nothing wrong with doctors being paid--Luke was a Doctor--but, as in all things, the motive matters.