Is Wall Street Making Life or Death Decisions?

[housewolf]

Is your health insurance company traded on Wall Street?

If so, is Wall Street deciding your medical care?

It's hard to recall that for-profit corporations were once kept out of health care - in fact, for most of the 20th century. During this time, the nation's medical system was built largely by non-profit and charitable organizations, which is why so many hospitals are named for saints. Courts across the country ruled that for corporations to profit from medical care was simply "against sound public policy." In the early 1980's, however, when the financial and airline industries were deregulated, a similar process occurred for American medicine. For-profit corporations became newly encouraged to take leadership of health care. Deregulating health care into the free market was intended to drive down costs and to improve care. After all, medical care in 1980 consumed a whopping 9.1 percent of the nation's GDP.

Never mind that after 30 years in the free market, health care costs have doubled to consume 18 percent of the GDP (with a third of these precious dollars wasted on bureaucracy). Never mind that health care has gotten increasingly inaccessible to the uninsured and even the insured, or that American health care has become an international poster child for reform.

more...
http://www.truth-out.org/is-wall-street-making-life-or-death-decisions62226

[golddigger]

1. YES!

[Chemical Bill]

2. Funny how people who listened to Palin talk about death panels...

never listen to talk like this. Stockholders can sue if a publicly traded company spends too much on health care and it eats into their dividends.

Bill

[kenny blankenship]

3. Didn't take them long to fuck it all up, either

True, they didn't blow off their fingers and genitals in just ten years like the deregulated banks. But in the grand scheme of things, burning your core market to the fucking ground in one generation is still a firestorm of FAIL.

Corporate healthcare companies : 30 years of progressive failure to achieve the socially sanctioned goals for which they were chartered. 30 years of higher costs and profits and share prices. 30 years of staggering costs to business and countless personal bankruptcies and early death.

I know what - Let's make it a Federal law that you HAVE TO buy their shitty products - that's bound to fix the problem!

[Kablooie]

4. This ... from Time Magazine -- 1983

Prescription for Profits
By JANICE CASTRO;ANNE CONSTABLE;MAGDA KRANCE Monday, Jul. 04, 1983

Private hospital firms bring management skills to the bedside

Every morning about 1 million Americans wake up in hospitals. By the end of the day they have run up medical bills totaling some $375 million. Until about ten years ago, most hospitals were operated as nonprofit community institutions without much regard for cost-effective management. But now private enterprise has discovered the hospital business. Says U.S. Senator Howard Metzenbaum of Ohio: "There is one business that is growing faster than the computer business—franchised medicine."

Nearly one in every five U.S. hospitals is now owned or managed by profitmaking companies. The number has grown more than 40% since 1977, even as the overall number of U.S. hospitals has declined about 10%, to some 6,900. At present, publicly held companies own 1,045 facilities and manage another 283. Private enterprise was drawn to the business primarily by steep increases in expenditures for medical care, especially for Medicare and Medicaid, which totaled $86.2 billion last year.
...

Hospitals-for-profit are not a new phenomenon, of course. Groups of local doctors have long owned some small facilities. But today those hospitals are more likely to be members of large national chains. Indeed, nearly 40% of all U.S. hospitals are already linked in multihospital systems. More than 60% are expected to belong to such groups by 1990.
...

Critics accuse the chains of overcharging patients or of skimming the cream from the patient population. At a hospital industry conference in April, Metzenbaum snapped at a group of private hospital officials: "You and your organizations have taken the side of private greed." According to the Senator, for-profit hospitals in Florida charge an average of 14.3% more than nonprofit ones.

Opponents claim that the profitmaking hospitals "dump" poor or uninsured patients by sending them to the nearest public hospital. Critics also charge that they concentrate on such relatively simple yet expensive treatments as delivering babies and removing gall bladders, but leave less profitable procedures like organ transplants and cancer therapy to large teaching hospitals.
...

The graying of America will swell medical costs for years to come. Some 11.6% of all U.S. citizens are now 65 or older, and by the year 2025 the figure will be up to 19.2%. This group generally needs about four times as much medical care as other sectors of the population. As America's medical demands continue to increase, both privately owned and nonprofit hospitals will be looking to professional managers who can wield a scalpel with the skill of a top surgeon when it comes to paring costs.