One Part of Healthcare

Like any other business, hospitals HAVE to make money in order to stay open. Bills must be paid to keep electricity and running water, staff must be paid, etc. With that in mind, consider this excerpt from the book Overtreated by Shannon Brownlee (I recommend the book, by the way, if you want a breakdown of how Medicare works):

Congestive heart failure is the most common diagnosis leading to hospitalization among the elderly, and it’s a miserable condition to have, because when you go into a crisis and your lungs fill with fluid, you feel as if you’re drowning. Several hospitals have demonstrated than an integrated approach to care can keep heart failure patients from having a crisis and out of the hospital for long stretches. In 1995, for example, Duke University Medical Center instituted a program that allowed nurses to call heart failure patients regularly at home to check on their breathing, and to make sure they were taking the right medication, and taking it properly. Nutritionists helped patients improve their diets. Doctors shared information about them, and came up with new ways to improve care. The number of hospital admissions for congestive heart failure at Duke declined, and patients who were admitted spent less time in the hospital, bringing down the costs for insurers by 37%. There was only one problem: Duke lost money. Bringing down costs meant hospital revenue was down, due to a decline in heart failure admissions and the premium (money) hospitals make from Medicare for complicated cases. Other hospitals have run into the same problem when they implemented similar integrated care programs for such conditions as pneumonia, diabetes, and heart failure. That leaves hospitals looking for profit where they can, and providing care that loses money only when they must.

How backwards is that? Hospitals can’t help people in the most non-invasive, cost-effective way because they lose too much money. Insurance companies and Medicare pay only for certain procedures (surgeries, etc.)…they DON’T pay for the doctors and nurses to talk, even if it is about medicine and diets. Until insurance companies and Medicare start reimbursing doctors and nurses for their TIME instead of the amount of procedures, the cost of health care won’t be going down or even stabilizing (in my own opinion). How can it if doctors are forced to do the expensive stuff just to get paid?

What’s your opinion on it?