IT’S HIGH TIME TO FIX OUR HOSPITALS
In the hospital, sad to say, a body is nothing more than a widget. A body creates revenue if the body is the right kind of sick for the right length of time. Kindly assistants, competent nurses, and decent physicians try to humanize the widget, but they are constrained by a system driven by the bottom line. Certain kinds of illnesses, especially ones treatable with surgery and drugs, make money. Others do not. In a hospital, there is no economic incentive to keep you healthy, to get you well, or for that matter to keep you alive. Health and life are human values, not financial ones; an unregulated market in the treatment of our bodies generates profitable sickness rather than human thriving.
Doctors hate all of this. Doctors of an older generation say that things were better in
