Hospitals, once run by nuns and charities, are becoming big business. An article in the New York Times published on August 14, 2012 tells how profits are up, sometimes at the cost of lives (read it here).
A major investor in HCA, one of the largest hospital conglomerates in the country, is Bain Capital, the firm of Presidential candidate Mitt Romney.
The formula is simple: Buy a hospital, cut expenses and increase revenues to make higher profits.
Cutting costs has included putting fewer nurses on station and turning people away at the emergency room. These efforts have lead to patient deaths.
Increasing revenues has included changing billing codes to get more out of Medicare (no wonder Romney want to "restore cuts to Medicare").
Market place economics do not work well in health care because the purchaser of the service (government and the insurance companies) are not the recipient of the service (patients). Since hospitals in most areas do not face "competition in the market place" because of the size of the investment, only regulation can keep this essential service from being gruesomely driven by the profit motive.
Romney wants to reduce that regulation, and favors – surprise– a voucher system that would have patients and states and insurance companies trying to negotiate with hospitals where there is little or no alternative.
Romney wants government smaller so there will be less supervision of the profit-making machines that he has championed his whole life. An exceedingly rich man, he doesn't understand what it is like to be on limited income and facing horrific medical expenses. With his large and involved family, he can't understand what it would be like to be cared for by harried and overworked nurses.
He just knows that there is money to be made.
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