IN SUMMARY: With health-care firms making excess profits of $65bn a year the worst offenders are not pharma firms but an army of corporate health-care middlemen. Total excess profits amount to only about 4% of America’s health-care spending. But this still makes health care the second biggest of the giant rent-seeking industries that have come to dominate parts of the economy. The excess profits of the health-care firms are equivalent to $200 per American per year, compared with $69 for the telecoms and cable TV industry and $25 captured by the airline oligopoly. Only the five big tech “platform” firms, with a figure of $250, are more brazen gougers.