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Bob Ziegelaar is the director of Northern Light Eastern Maine Medical Center. His opinions are personal and may not reflect the opinions of other board members or professionals associated with the hospital.
Among the “developed countries,” the United States and the United Kingdom stand out as countries with failed health systems, albeit for different reasons. While American healthcare is suffering from excessive profiteering, Britain’s healthcare system is collapsing under the weight of faulty government administration.
Health insurance, whether private, public, or mixed, has long been an important foundation of any health care system. In the United States, mutual insurance companies with policyholders as owners, like the Blue Cross/Blue Shield organizations of the past, were the winning model. However, as funding flows increased, interest from the financial sector grew, gradually turning American health care into a marketplace for profit-seeking companies and investors.
In the 1980s, doctors, concerned about declining incomes as the number of medical students increased, persuaded the American Medical Association (AMA) to win a victory over colleges and universities. Reduce the number of medical students. It turned out to be a disastrous miscalculation, the consequences of which still haunt us today. As patient demand and physician shortages increase, the United States has recruited thousands of workers. Foreign doctors and medical students To make up for the shortcomings, recently a huge number of “urgent care” facilities has contributed to the maze of services that American patients must now navigate.
As medicine advances and treatments improve, many rural hospitals develop their own specialty departments to increase their earning potential. For-profit insurers have expanded their scope accordingly, and some large insurers have entered health care services directly. Following this trend, companies’ quarterly earnings and dividend reports have become a driving force in American health care, giving a few large corporations enormous political influence in the development of U.S. health policy.
As the government continues to strengthen supervision, performance criteriaTo improve outcomes, hospital management must undertake multiple new layers of financial management and overall documentation, becoming more complex and more expensive. Previously, doctors spent time with patients as they saw fit, but were caught up in a web of record keeping and patient scheduling. As a result, expertise in finance, planning, quality management, compliance, legal, human resources, marketing and public relations have all become permanent fixtures of hospital administration and have significant cost implications.
If national governments have an overriding responsibility, it is to protect population health, not only for humanitarian reasons, but also as a practical and important policy aspect for maintaining healthy economic and social functioning. While capitalism has its strengths in terms of productive efficiency, the private sector tends to be less effective in providing essential community services at lower costs. This is because profits and taxation opportunities tend to work against the advancement of public health.
Americans have seen the healthcare “marketplace” create massive corporate profits and wealth creation opportunities. This wouldn’t be a problem if increased efficiency, reduced costs, and improved outcomes came together. But in fact, the opposite was true. Representative examples include pharmaceutical companies and health insurance companies. most profitable That’s partly because of American taxpayers. subsidize both. Recently, Congress has tolerated further exploitation of American health care by allowing “private equity” to acquire hospitals and specialty care providers, all too often eliminating actual assets for resale for significant profits.
American healthcare is collapsing due to private sector financial opportunism. Although there have been feats of ingenuity in the development of products and services, falling results and rising costs This is a huge concern. The current incompetence of the Department of Health and Human Services appears to further undermine America’s dominance in global healthcare. many rural hospital will fail Or, they could become regional clinics and require patients to travel to larger metro centers to receive specialty care.
At this stage, the road to recovery appears to be political. If American voters can unite to drive out of office the lawmakers who have allowed our health care system to approach a state of failure, we can force the changes we need.
There is room for private profit in health care, but only when it is directly linked to improved public health and affordability. In other countries, affordable universal health care is can work It is time to combine the best private and public resources for the benefit of the entire population, not just vested interests.
