These people are really sick: The Conglomerate Will See You Now....

[Flabbergasted]

http://www.ge.com/en/company/news/cong_will_see.htm

Imagine a small town where one person not only owns the hardware store, but is also the banker and the doctor's most trusted adviser. In a sense, General Electric is trying to play such a role in the nation's $2 trillion health care industry.

New York-Presbyterian Hospital, one of the country's largest academic medical centers, is among the hospitals making a bet on G.E.'s move toward one-stop shopping. Last fall, it announced a seven-year, $500 million agreement that calls for General Electric to offer advice -- and discounts -- on technology, as well as ways to increase efficiency. G.E. is also offering options for financing.

Dozens of G.E.-trained ''black belts'' and ''green belts'' -- experts in a data-driven management method called Six Sigma -- are already wandering the hospital's halls, looking for things to improve.

And, if New York-Presbyterian needs light bulbs, G.E. will supply those, too.

With $14 billion in sales, G.E.'s health care business is among its fastest-growing and most profitable units, and one that is central to the vision of its chief executive, Jeffrey R. Immelt, who rose to the top job after running the company's medical systems unit. He is unapologetic about G.E.'s growing role in providing management skills and financing as well as hardware to hospitals. G.E. is responsible for important advances in medical technology, he said, and can bring a businesslike efficiency to an industry that is badly in need of it.

Some critics ask, however, if what is good for G.E. is always good for the nation's health care system. Medical technology, the company's specialty, is a leading contributor to runaway health care costs, and some medical professionals and consumer groups say the conglomerate's growing influence among hospitals and doctors raises issues about the way scarce dollars are being spent.

snip

Policy analysts, however, say that this rate of growth is being driven in large part by the very technology that companies like G.E. are promoting. Doctors and hospitals are eager customers of the latest machines as they increasingly turn to diagnostic tests as a source of additional revenue. Doctors, in particular, are looking for new income as insurers have squeezed payments for traditional office visits.

snip

G.E.'s sales pitch is aimed squarely at a doctor's desire to make more money from doing more tests. The company even sells research to physicians that provides five-year projections of demand for certain tests in their markets -- and helps doctors calculate the potential fees from different types of diagnostic tests. In selling an exam table that doubles as a device to measure bone density, G.E. trumpets the system's potential revenue: $30,000 a year if a doctor sees five patients a week.

snip

Still, the many roles of General Electric raise concerns about possible conflicts, especially because it is so influential in shaping policy. ''G.E. is a huge company: on one hand, a supplier; on the other hand, by being such a large employer, a purchaser,'' said Dr. Alan M. Garber, a Stanford economist and professor of medicine. ''It is important to be aware that a large company may play multiple roles and conflict may arise,'' although he added that he was not aware of actual conflicts.

snip

G.E. has also taken heat for the way many doctors use some of its products. A few years ago, for example, it and others successfully lobbied Congress to authorize higher Medicare payments for digital mammography for routine breast cancer screening. Digital mammography, which costs Medicare much more than older technologies that use X-ray film, is widely approved for women who have already had suspicious breast tumors detected, but experts say there is no evidence to justify the extra expenses of digital for routine screening. The National Academy of Sciences has repeatedly found ''no convincing evidence'' that digital mammography is better than X-ray film in screening for breast cancer, said Dr. Roger Herdman, director of the academy's National Cancer Policy Board.

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''I never want to see us positioned as a company that benefits from the inefficiencies of the health care system,'' he said. (Yeah right)

[Warpy]

1. "Hire more nurses" will not be among the recommendations

and neither will be "hire more personnel" in general. Health care is a labor intensive business, so they're trying to cut as much labor as possible.

They'd have better patient outcomes if they skimped on more technology and hired more PEOPLE.

But GE's guys weren't sent in to find that out, were they?