Letter: Let’s get profit out of health care

Posted on by Letters
Graphic by Lori Deaton

Health care administrators are business folk. They generally have a Master of Business Administration degree. They follow that with a short time spent learning how to manipulate the available monies within health care. They do not provide health care. Their role is to keep the money flowing so the community has health care. The experts (physicians and nurses) tell administration what things are needed. The administrator’s obligation is to provide those things.

The Medicare and Medicaid programs in our country were put in place in 1965 to provide health care during retirement years and care for those unable to pay for their own. These systems were susceptible to fraud and abuse. To maintain the solvency of these programs, DRGs (Diagnosis-Related Groups) were enacted in 1983 as a regulating device to stop these abuses. Many small community hospitals across our country didn’t survive these changes. It felt like money was taken away or no longer available.

The International Journal of Health Services in Volume 51(1) of 2021, pages 67-89, addresses these concerns in its article, “For-Profit Hospitals Have Thrived Because of Generous Public Reimbursement Schemes, Not Greater Efficiency: A Multi-Country Case Study.” Research reveals public hospitals and nonprofit hospitals produce better patient outcomes than the for-profit ones.

All excess monies within a health care system were at one time reserved to provide the same level of care to the most unfortunate among us. These extra funds were also held in trust to provide for the maintenance of facilities, the purchase of new and improved equipment, and construction of new facilities.

Please join me in petitioning our representative, Rep. Chuck Edwards, to introduce the necessary legislation in the People’s House in Washington, D.C., the House of Representatives, to repeal the ability to profit from pain, misery, illness, infection and death. Let’s make WNC the home of the people who changed the country!

— Jill McMahon
Asheville

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One thought on “Letter: Let’s get profit out of health care”

  1. Voirdire

    Sounds good ….Chuck Edwards is a big fan/ worshiper of MAGA HCA though and their profit driven zeitgeist. No help coming from there/him I’m afraid.

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