From Atul Gawande's article in the June 1, 2009 issue of The New Yorker entilted, "The Cost Connundrum". Why are medical costs twice as much in some parts of the country than others with no increase in quality or outcomes?
"But decades ago Mayo recognized that the first thing it needed to do was eliminate the financial barriers. It pooled all the money the doctors and the hospital system received and began paying everyone a salary, so that the doctors’ goal in patient care couldn’t be increasing their income. Mayo promoted leaders who focussed first on what was best for patients, and then on how to make this financially possible."
Many physicians and hospitals are pigs at the trough trying to maximize income and to hell with the patients. Patients are only the necessary recipient of services and procedures that can be billed for. It is all in the billing baby because that's what makes the money flow.
Medicine, unfortunately, has been perverted from a human service to a mercenary business. Where it is managed as an "industry" to increase the profit line there are problems. Who would have guessed?
Running health care for profit is bad social policy and needs to be stopped.
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