Give Up Blog

Friday, June 23, 2006

Yet again, private industry fails.

"Nonprofit health care often better, study says" is the headline of yet another article refuting the idea that private enterprise is better than public or nonprofit industry.

For-profit nursing homes and hospitals on average provide an inferior quality of care compared with their nonprofit peers, according to an extensive review of studies published on Tuesday found.
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Authors writing in the journal Health Affairs found that a systematic analysis of 162 studies of nonprofit versus for-profit health care providers supports the concept that a facility's ownership status makes a difference in outcomes and in the cost of health care.
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In what they called the biggest review of the literature to date, authors reported that eight studies found nonprofit hospitals have lower mortality rates, versus one study finding for-profits have lower rates of death.

Nonprofit hospitals are also better at keeping costs down, the review found.

For nursing homes, the majority of studies find quality of care better at nonprofits, although for-profit nursing homes are superior at keeping costs down.
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Nonprofits provide benefits that are not easy to quantify, the study argues. For example, there is evidence that for-profits are more likely to mark up prices to maximize revenue and to have complaints lodged against them.

There is also evidence that nonprofits have a "spillover effect" in markets where they co-exist with for-profits, the study said. That is, they "enhance the quality and trustworthiness" of for-profits in a given market.

So, where is the data showing that private industry is more efficient or cheaper than public industry again? It's an old saw of the conservatives that private industry is more efficient and innovative, however I think the data shows that private industry consistently fails to innovate and is more expensive. Only when government steps in with regulation to force innovation, consumer protection, and responsible business practices do we see improvements, then the industries in question usually put out commercials talking about the regulation-forced innovations as if it was their idea.

**cough** clean coal **cough** automotive safety **cough**

3 Comments:

Jeff said...

Your website makes some good points. However, to use the material in a real debate would require more sources of information, especially for statistics claimed. Otherwise, it runs the risk of being dismissed as another 'moonbat left-wing blog'. The GOP likes to hear facts and figures before they resort to ad homs, strawmen and slippery-slope logical fallacies once their claims are refuted. Just my thoughts. And the Coulter-Hitler test rocks. But again, sources (such as when and where the quote occurred) would give it more merit in a debate.

Enjoy!

1:03 AM, June 23, 2006

Taylor W. Buley said...

Hey, dumbass: non-profits are part of the private sector.

8:05 AM, June 23, 2006

Rev. Dr. said...

Jeff,
All the maps have the source information at the bottom of the posts. The Coulter quotes were almost all pulled from a single source, Treason. The second page of the quiz, after you submit your answers, gives the sourcing information.
From the page:
Sources: #3 comes from Anne Coulter, J’Accuse Ted Olsen, May 23rd 2001, Universal Press Syndicate.
#13 comes from Anne Coulter, People United for Swindles and Hucksterism, January 24th 2001, Universal Press Syndicate. The rest come from Treason.

As far as taylor is concerned, I'm referring generally to "for-profit" private enterprise, sorry my language was not exact. The main point is, that companies like HCA and the HMOs that were formed during the 90s to restrain the increases in health care costs appear to have been a failure on multiple levels. Not only is health care escalating in cost, but they make profit by screwing patients and overcharging. There has never been any proof that HMOs or the current system are even better than the fee-for-service system that existed before. In fact, the data suggests that Americans have the worst healthcare, dollar for dollar, in the world. We pay more than any other country, per capita, while we're ranked by the WHO as being 38th for health care, behind all the other industrialized nations.

So, my general point that turning things over to for-profit private enterprise is not a solution stands. I'm an advocate of single-payer, and one of the main health care providers in this study was the VA. Now, the VA has gotten a lot better in the last couple decades, but if private health care isn't even beating the VA system? Holy shit, you're a failure.

9:59 AM, June 23, 2006