16 Jul

corporations and health care

It might seem otherwise, but there’s a difference between health care motivated by capitalism and health-care run by publicly-traded for-profit corporations. It’s been shown to be true that non-profit health care systems have the lowest costs, the best care, and happy, well-compensated employees. Non-profit doesn’t mean they aren’t motivated by market forces to succeed. Here are two examples:

Sutter Health
Mayo Clinic

While both started as small and regional, the Mayo Clinic has attempted and succeeded in replicating their success and Sutter Health is growing year over year geographically.

Health-care run by for-profit corporations is all about maximizing profit for shareholders. Health-care run by non-profits is all about maximizing patient care for the dollar and maximizing profits to reinvest in research and better care going forward.

I was reading this article recently:

Wide support for government health plan: Poll

So, if the government wants to spend a bunch of money on health care, why not use it to encourage the development of more non-profit hospitals and other medical facilities, as well as non-profit insurance companies?

The government has a terrible track record in health care, with Medicare and Medicaid being profound, expensive failures that deliver substandard health care that costs more than what these non-profits have been providing for decades.

In the end, a plausible solution is to help push the entire healthcare industry towards the non-profit end of the spectrum. It would be difficult to wave a magic wand and do it, but a helpful nudge wouldn’t hurt. In areas of the country served by non-profit healthcare, a for-profit hospital simply couldn’t compete.

When your company has shareholder pressure to return 40% profits every year, how can you compete against a concern that doesn’t feel that pressure, but can use those profits to invest in new technology, better doctors, or other things to lower costs for patients.