There’s nothing Americans like more than a rags-to-riches story. So, there’s no surprise that Rick Jackson, the businessman who serves as the GOP’s nominee for governor this November, has told his story over and over again on the campaign trail.

As a child, he bounced from foster home to foster home. But decades later, he’s a billionaire who owns a 47,000-square-foot mansion, Le Rêve — that’s French for “the dream,” also the name of a famous Picasso painting — sitting on 72 acres in Forsyth County.

To many Georgians, that’s the American Dream. But what worries me about Jackson is not that he escaped poverty and found financial success. That’s a path we should want open to all Georgians from Blairsville to Brunswick.

What I fear is that we increasingly live in a state and country where that opportunity is being closed off by the rich and powerful — people like Jackson himself.

Jackson made his fortune in healthcare, but he isn’t a brilliant scientist who invented a life-saving vaccine, nor does he hold any type of medical degree. Instead, his fortune comes from buying up a phalanx of healthcare staffing firms that make up Jackson Healthcare, his company.

Americans often scratch their heads and wonder why healthcare is more expensive here than it is in most other places in the world. One explanation is that our system is inefficient — it is full of middlemen and corporate bureaucrats who help drive up prices without improving services. Private equity, for instance, has been buying up hospitals and squeezing them for short-term profits while lowering standards of quality.

And with these amassed resources, this financialized health sector is increasingly politically influential and resistant to change that would streamline the system and lower costs for patients. It is monopoly capitalism at its worst.

No-bid contracts and medical company purchases

Jackson has worked hard to turn his personal wealth into political power. He has recruited influential politicos like former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and former U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Tom Price to Jackson Healthcare’s advisory board.

It should hardly be any surprise that Jackson’s companies netted almost a billion dollars in state contracts since 2020. That year, Jackson Healthcare won a no-bid contract from the state worth tens of millions of dollars, leading some to speculate that his political connections and status as a major donor ended up benefiting him.

While the COVID-19 pandemic was an unusual emergency, Jackson is no stranger to seeking subsidies from taxpayers.

In 2021, Jackson purchased what is now called the USAntibiotics plant in Tennessee, which is one of the sole sources of amoxicillin production in the country. This is an important drug that is used to treat conditions like pneumonia and ear infections.

Yet much of the production of the drug and its components now comes from overseas, including from China.

Jackson purchased the plant in 2021, rescuing it from bankruptcy. He declared that the purchase meant that “America will have declared its independence from Chinese antibiotics.”

Jackson has worked hard to turn his personal wealth into political power. He has recruited influential politicos like former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and former U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Tom Price to Jackson Healthcare’s advisory board.

It should hardly be any surprise that Jackson’s companies netted almost a billion dollars in state contracts since 2020. That year, Jackson Healthcare won a no-bid contract from the state worth tens of millions of dollars, leading some to speculate that his political connections and status as a major donor ended up benefiting him.

While the COVID-19 pandemic was an unusual emergency, Jackson is no stranger to seeking subsidies from taxpayers.

In 2021, Jackson purchased what is now called the USAntibiotics plant in Tennessee, which is one of the sole sources of amoxicillin production in the country. This is an important drug that is used to treat conditions like pneumonia and ear infections.

Yet much of the production of the drug and its components now comes from overseas, including from China.

Jackson purchased the plant in 2021, rescuing it from bankruptcy. He declared that the purchase meant that “America will have declared its independence from Chinese antibiotics.”

But by 2024, he had started to change his tune. The factory was producing around a million doses of amoxicillin a day, but Jackson was disappointed it wasn’t more profitable. He wanted the U.S. government to start supporting it as a customer.

“Am I frustrated by not getting any traction and so forth with the government paying for it? Yes,” he said in a 2024 podcast episode of The Wall Street Journal’s “The Journal” show.

When asked by the Journal what his threshold for supporting the plant is, he replied bluntly: “I haven’t drawn a line, but if I determine, for instance, in the next year, year and a half, that there is no way that the government will ever buy, I’m going to shut it down.” (The plant is still open, suggesting Jackson is not yet ready to execute his ultimatum).

How Jackson’s proposals would benefit him

All of this is relevant because Jackson seems determined to exercise the same influence over our state government that he has in the medical world. He has spent over $100 million of his personal wealth on the race, and he may end up spending far more than that to try and defeat Keisha Lance Bottoms, the Democratic nominee for governor.

He is essentially taking the wealth he built up as a health industry tycoon and as the recipient of extraordinary amounts of taxpayer money and using it to buy the election. His platform, unsurprisingly, says nothing about healthcare monopolization as a cause of the outrageous prices that Georgians and others in this country pay for care.

What he is running on, however, is giving himself a massive tax cut. He says he will “freeze property taxes” and halve Georgia’s state income tax in his first four years in office and then eliminate it altogether by his eighth.

It’s important to put this into perspective. Property taxes are the main source of revenue for Georgia’s schools. Freezing property taxes and cutting income taxes, particularly on gargantuan properties like Le Rêve and others like it, would effectively shuffle wealth upward while starving schools, police, roads and other necessary public infrastructure that enable ordinary Georgians to succeed in life.

Meanwhile, Jackson would be able to use his wealth to bend legislators to his will. A lawmaker refuses to go along with his tax scheme? He could write a million-dollar check to a special interest group to take them down. Contractors who do business with the state would likely be wary of crossing his empire of healthcare companies; even if he steps back from them during the duration of his reign, everyone knows that doing business with them would be a way to curry favor with the new governor.

Letting Jackson buy control of our state would fundamentally transform Georgia in ways that imperil our democracy itself.

Years ago, my father came to Atlanta after growing up overseas in Pakistan. He once encountered former Republican U.S. Sen. Paul Coverdell in line at a restaurant. He motioned for Coverdell to go ahead. He was, after all, a U.S. senator. Where my father grew up, wealthy and well-connected people are frequently given privileged access no matter where they go.

But Coverdell told my father that he would not cut in front of him. He would wait like everyone else.

The experience impressed my father. For the first time in his life, he was able to stand on a level playing field with a powerful political figure. That was the promise of America — the promise of being a country “of, by, and for the people.”