Americans don't realize it, but they've entrusted their lives to a fundamentally broken hospital system that consumes a level of capital equal to South Korea's GDP, runs on deeply dysfunctional software, is responsible for tens of thousands of accidental deaths a year, and whose employees commit suicide at a rate twice that of the general public.
Wealthy hospital systems are buying up competing hospitals and physician practices, subsuming them under a head corporation, and removing the independence that doctors once prized.
Physicians, buffeted by these trends and at the whims of hospital administrators focused on system revenue, have begun calling for unionization, or at least professional cooperation.
Hospital finances are closely held, and the actual amount that it costs a hospital to provide treatment for, say, a knee replacement, is unknown to all except the administrators.
Prices for hospital care, as a result, are set falsely high.
Elizabeth Rosenthal, author and editor-in-chief of Kaiser Health News, compares such pricing to airline flight times: arbitrarily long, so the airline can market its on-time arrivals and the hospital can pretend it's giving patients a good deal while grabbing every dollar.
The hospital lobby had such a strong influence on the bill that the caps are pretty much what the hospitals were already charging.
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/medicare-for-all-wont-fix-americas-broken-hospital-system/
Wealthy hospital systems are buying up competing hospitals and physician practices, subsuming them under a head corporation, and removing the independence that doctors once prized.
Physicians, buffeted by these trends and at the whims of hospital administrators focused on system revenue, have begun calling for unionization, or at least professional cooperation.
Hospital finances are closely held, and the actual amount that it costs a hospital to provide treatment for, say, a knee replacement, is unknown to all except the administrators.
Prices for hospital care, as a result, are set falsely high.
Elizabeth Rosenthal, author and editor-in-chief of Kaiser Health News, compares such pricing to airline flight times: arbitrarily long, so the airline can market its on-time arrivals and the hospital can pretend it's giving patients a good deal while grabbing every dollar.
The hospital lobby had such a strong influence on the bill that the caps are pretty much what the hospitals were already charging.
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/medicare-for-all-wont-fix-americas-broken-hospital-system/
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