Trillions of dollars spent on U.S. healthcare, but hospitals are running hyper-efficient, lean staffs, with barely any ability to scale up to meet demand during a crisis.
Wondering out loud - with non-profits, the IRS can enforce that status by forcing them to spend if they have too much money saved. Am I getting this correct?
What about forcing hospitals to spend on staff if they are too profitable?
I’m being purposefully vague to fill in the holes with discussion.
Feel free to throw tomatoes at me if it’s a dumb idea. I’ve had dumber.
> What about forcing hospitals to spend on staff if they are too profitable?
Why do I suspect we'd see 'hollywood' accounting for medical if this ever were to be a 'thing'?
'Medical accounting' would become such a thing that we'd end up seeing every hospital running in the red all the time, to avoid this sort of thing. Someone would still be bringing in profits, but much much harder to spot.
It's an excellent analogy: The triumph of beancounters turns out to be brittle and costly when, in this case track maintenance, unprofitable but necessary activities and capex are reduced. "It worked fine this quarter!"
I regularly see executives incentivized and rewarded for short term thinking.
I never see executives pay a price for the results of years of short term thinking - they only get punished for failing to meet quarterly targets.
Execs often jump around before the results of their shortsightedness bear fruit.
I dream of a world where the performance of leaders and decision makers is linked with the long term performance of the organizations that they used to manage as well as the one that they currently lead.
The sickest part is the "billed to insurance" value. You get a medical bill that looks like this:
Cost: $1000
Paid by patient: $200
Billed to insurance: $800
Paid by insurance: $150
Remaining to be paid: $0
I get statements that look like this all the time, where the provider "bills" the insurance for $N, but the insurance pays a fraction of it, and apparently that's "good enough".
But when they tell me "that'll be $200 today, please, we take Visa and Discover", I don't have the option to say "actually I'm gonna pay $50 and that's good enough"
I have heard that for a birth (since you have some advance notice), you can go in to the hospital, sit down, and say "I will be having a baby here, and I will pay in cash, in full. Let's hammer out some costs" and maybe actually negotiate something acceptable.
Hyper efficiency isn't about you, it's for the corporation and, to no small degree, the insurance company.
I'd have to imagine that the amortized cost (millions?) for the MRI machine, it's operation and storage, and the trained personnel isn't free, but obviously much less than you and your insurance pay.
That word is being used in a different way in this case. Maybe it's an economic definition of "efficient" but I'm not sure. It means they are spending bare minimum on staff/expenses to achieve whatever goals they have. Like "lean".
Trillions of dollars spent on U.S. healthcare, but hospitals are running hyper-efficient, lean staffs, with barely any ability to scale up to meet demand during a crisis.