Glad we're agreed that their taxes need to be lowered:
A report by federal health care inspectors in November said the U.S. nursing home industry overbills Medicare $1.5 billion a year for treatments patients don’t need or never receive.Not disclosed was how much worse it is when providers have a profit motive. Thirty per cent of claims sampled from for- profit homes were deemed improper, compared to just 12 percent from non-profits, according to data Bloomberg News obtained from the inspector general’s office of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services via a Freedom of Information Act request.
Once freed from the yoke of oppressive taxation, America's entrepreneurs can unleash the power of market forces to generate wealth and create jobs:
Private equity investors completed more than 450 hospital transactions in the past decade valued at nearly $50 billion, according to Pitchbook Data, a Seattle-based market research firm. Major hospital buyouts include Cerberus Capital’s $830 million acquisition of Caritas Christi’s six hospitals in Massachusetts in 2010, and Blackstone Group’s $1.3 billion purchase of Detroit Medical Center the same year [...]Investor-owned facilities earn a 20 percent profit margin on Medicare patients compared to 9 percent for nonprofit operators, according to Medpac. Medicare pays nursing homes about a third of their revenues, while Medicaid, the state-federal health insurance program for the poor, accounts for roughly 50 percent. The bulk of the rest is from private payers.
The 10 largest for-profit nursing-home chains employed 37 percent fewer registered nurses per patient-day between 2003 and 2008---and received 59 percent more deficiency notices from government inspectors---than nonprofits did, according to a study published last year in the journal Health Services Research.
Driven by efficiency and fueled by innovation, America's private sector leads the way in providing quality health care:
When Ruby Gene Papania, 77, was admitted to Skilled Healthcare’s Granada nursing home in Eureka in September 2010, nurses noted in her chart that she had a high risk of falls and needed extra assistance moving around, according to a lawsuit filed by Papania’s daughters last year.Papania’s care plan said transfers from bed and to the toilet required two staff members as a precaution, or the use of a mechanical lift, the suit said.
Before her death seven months later, Papania fell three times, broke and re-broke her hip, underwent two hip surgeries and an amputation and contracted several urinary tract infections, bed sores, malnutrition and pneumonia because the facility was understaffed “to reduce labor costs and to increase profits,” according to the daughters’ suit, which alleged elder abuse, fraud and wrongful death.
The company settled the litigation under undisclosed terms and denied the allegations.
Bet you can't read the whole piece without reaching for your blood-pressure meds. Assuming you can even afford them, of course.
Have said it before, and I'll say it again. The authors of the Affordable Care Act may have had the best intentions, but their legislation---like all the serious alternatives that have been discussed in the past---suffers from one fatal flaw: it perpetuates an immoral status quo that allows evil people with money to profit directly off the misery and suffering of others. Such rent-seeking off the sickness of the poor and the elderly serves no useful social purpose beyond enriching the rentiers, and leads to thousands of premature deaths each year, with much of it paid for by taxpayers.
For-profit health care doesn't need to be regulated---it needs to be banned outright. Some market behaviors are simply too essential to the functioning of a civil society to be left to the whims of profiteers. Realize I'm basically spitting in the wind here, but that really needs to be the end goal of progressive health-care reform.
---Baron V
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