Is The Health Care of America In The Right Hands?

What is your health insurance? That is one of the questions that I, as a nurse, had to ask all of my patients on the procedure table as they were having a heart attack. That was one of the things that always angered me at this place that I once worked for. And as I asked the question I kept thinking, what difference should this make at this point anyway? We doctors and nurses should still have to provide the best care possible for the patient. Coincidentally, this hospital is part of the largest for-profit health care organization in this nation. It's the same organizations that had defrauded Medicare, Medicaid and Tricare since 1980 and forced its administrators to layoff key employees involved in the process of the care of patients, until the FBI got involved and revealed the criminal practices of the company. The organization settled with the government in 2003 for 1.7 billion dollars as you can read at the department of justice web site http://www.usdoj.gov/opa/pr/2003/June/03_civ_386.htm . But it still lingers on with the same hard core business philosophy. In other words, how can we trust our lives in the hands of for-profit (and believe me only for profit) business organizations to provide health care?
The basic motivation of any business is to make as much money as possible. It's a great concept and works very well when the product is a car or anything that has some predictable and intentional outcome. Making money off a heart attack is something a little more complicated. That's when several questions pop up in my head. What is the motivation of a CEO of a for-profit hospital? Is he interested in the quality of care no matter the cost or is he interested in watching the budget at any cost? Can hospitals be profitable without compromising the care? Here is my answer as I remember the same sick patients coming back a few months later after they received low cost care: I don't think so.
There is a clear conflict of interest between the business side and the public service side of a for-profit health care company. Indeed it is a very difficult business to run due to its lack of predictability. No owner knows if the next customer will be a millionaire with flu or an uninsured middle class worker with cancer, but yet they both need to receive the same quality of treatment. And the way to generate the money for the care, plus the profit for the company and its share holders is to cut costs, which is a very risky practice when dealing with human lives. Or another way to "manage the budget" would be to use the same tactics as the one case in the beginning of this text, which is gradually stealing from the taxpayers.
No, I don't believe that health care is in the right hands and I also predicted that if these hands don't stop handling our health we will all end up very sick and broke.