Health Care and Pursuit of Profit Make a Poor Mix – NYTimes.com.
If you’re feeling bulimic today, you can read (above) a leftist, Eduardo Porter, telling us that profit and health care don’t mix.
Health care professionals are supposed to do their work for free. Profit is evil and the motivation for making money should not have any association with health care. How this leftie expects to attract people to incur huge educational debt, and enter into a very difficult field to work for nothing, is anyone’s guess.
There’s a claim in the NYT article that a health care institution which switches from non-profit to for-profit is more likely to experience patient deaths over subsequent two years. The cited study admits that the shock of switching management and workers, and a myriad of other factors could have much more to do with this effect than the mere acquisition of a profit motive. In fact, the effect of the staffing changes, and the patient mortality rate recedes after the initial shock of change. This is a strong indicator that the mere profitability has nothing to do with the mortality rate, and that the shock of reorganization and personnel changes has everything to do with it. The initial pressures of an institution to sell out to private investors is also discussed in the original study as a major factor.
The NYT also cites a 30 year old study of an unmentioned number of Southern Wisconsin nursing homes, and implied from the invisible data that for-profit institutions used higher doses of sedatives in their patients than the non-profits.
That the New York Times would try to convince you that health care workers and institutions should provide services for free, or at cost, is no surprise. That they would extrapolate the study results from religious affiliated non-profits, and pretend that government-run institutions would operate similarly is similarly not a surprise.
It would, however, be a huge shock and surprise to see the leftie press calling for ABORTIONISTS to provide their services at cost, and take no profits. There’s a fortune in abortion, and this is true for Planned Parenthood, which is excused from taxes as a supposed non-profit (though it does make and report profit), as well as the multitudinous for-profit abortion industries. See an example of Planned Parenthood’s form 990. Don’t ever hold your breath waiting for abortionists to be held to the same standards as real health care providers.
You will NEVER hear a cry from the New York Times that Universities should cease to take profits, or stop paying their instructors and administrators well over the salaries and benefits of equally educated private sector employees. You will never hear them ask that the salaries and benefits of public school teachers be reduced to that of similarly educated private sector employees.
Those involved in furthering the agenda of the left will continue to reap profits and rewards well above the national average with the blessings of their media machine. However, they won’t be satisfied until the rest of us, who provide essential goods and services, are working and living as slaves.
