The Business of Healthcare Depends on Exploiting Doctors and Nurses

[klone, MSN, RN]

Quote

It is true that health care has become corporatized to an almost unrecognizable degree. But it is also true that most clinicians remain committed to the ethics that brought them into the field in the first place. This makes the hospital an inspiring place to work.

Increasingly, though, I’ve come to the uncomfortable realization that this ethic that I hold so dear is being cynically manipulated. By now, corporate medicine has milked just about all the “efficiency” it can out of the system. With mergers and streamlining, it has pushed the productivity numbers about as far as they can go. But one resource that seems endless — and free — is the professional ethic of medical staff members.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/08/opinion/sunday/hospitals-doctors-nurses-burnout.html

[Asystole RN]

It is easy to identify the problem, it is hard to identify the solution.

One of the referenced articles in the New York Times articles speaks to the fact that administrators (should be defined as non-clinical support staff, not just leadership) has grown by 3,200% since the 1970's. What excited me about that article is it actually cites some of the major changes that have influenced these changes, The Prospective Payment System of 1983, HIPAA of 1996, and the Affordable Care Act of 2009.

When you create federal laws aimed at controlling healthcare spending by punishing adequate staffing through the MS-DRG base labor rate (PPS), create massive administrative burdens by demanding the modern electronic medical records systems today that require massive amounts of charting (HIPAA), and create the value-based purchasing model that requires stupid hotel-like accommodations (ACA) ...and do it all without increasing federal resources but actually DECREASING resources no wonder modern healthcare is a sinking boat.