Today on the website, we have two stories that adequately describe how our corporatized health care system provides opportunities for corporations to buy up market share under the guise of convenience for the patient, while cutting costs to provide inadequate and substandard care.

American Economic Liberties Project staffers Sara Sirota and Krista Brown wrote about the decades-long history of UnitedHealth, the largest insurer & the largest employer of physicians in the country. United has captured so much of the health care market through aggressive mergers and acquiring subsidiaries in various parts of the market that a quarter of its revenues is collected from its own subsidiaries. You can read Sirota and Brown’s deep dive into UnitedHealth’s takeover of American health care here.

Luke Goldstein reports on Dollar General’s new foray into primary care, DG Wellbeing. Much in the same way that Dollar General’s business model capitalizes upon America’s stark economic inequality by intentionally opening locations in low-income areas and then pricing out competitors, the retailer has now set its sights on taking advantage of rural “health care deserts,” where traditional medical services are often inaccessible. Dollar General may be filling a void, but its retail model and extreme cost-cutting practices pose severe concerns for the quality of the medical treatment that patients will receive. You can read Luke’s story here.

These stories are part of our ongoing series on the business of health care—the inner workings of the monopolies and cartels extracting ever-greater sums for ever-lousier outcomes, and the policies and protocols pushing doctors and nurses to the brink—and increasingly into labor unions. You can read the entire series as it is released here.