No Wonder Our Hospitals Are a Disaster -- People with Marketing Degrees Are Running Them

[marmar]

via AlterNet:



No Wonder Our Hospitals Are a Disaster -- People with Marketing Degrees Are Running Them

By Maggie Mahar, Health Beat. Posted August 15, 2008.

Business school graduates have replaced doctors and public health experts as CEOs of hospitals, often at patients' expense.



This article originally appeared on Health Beat.

In 1970, a Fortune magazine cover story warned the nation: "Much of U.S. medical care, particularly the everyday business of preventing and treating routine illnesses, is inferior in quality, wastefully dispensed, and inequitably financed." That year, a Fortune editorial declared: "The time has come for radical change. ... The management of medical care is too important to leave to doctors who are, after all, not managers to begin with."

This was the beginning of the revolution Paul Starr described in his Pulitzer prize-winning 1982 book, The Social Transformation of American Medicine. In his final chapter, "The Coming of the Corporation," Starr expressed his concern that "those who talked about 'health care planning' in the 1970s now talk about 'health care marketing.' Everywhere one sees the growth of a kind of marketing mentality in health care. And, indeed, business school graduates are displacing graduates of public health schools, hospital administrators and even doctors in the top echelons of medical care organizations.

"The organizational culture of medicine used to be dominated by the ideals of professionalism and voluntarism which softened the underlying acquisitive activity," Starr wrote. "The restraints exercised by those ideals now grow weaker. The 'health center' of one era is the 'profit center' of the next."

In this brave new world of the 1980s, corporate executives would become both the wealthiest and the most powerful actors on the new cultural stage. Hospital CEOs would haul home salaries that made neurosurgeons look like pikers. In health care, as in other industries, CEOs, not physicians, make the decisions, and their goal, Starr suggested, would no longer be better health, but rather, "the rate of return on investments." .......(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.alternet.org/healthwellness/94797/no_wonder_our_hospitals_are_a_disaster_--_people_with_marketing_degrees_are_running_them/

[Tangerine LaBamba]

1. Have you paid attention to this development?

The rise of "hospitalists"? They're scary, standing very powerfully between the patient and any physician the patient might need. It's sort of like being God.

They're scary.

http://healthfieldmedicare.suite101.com/article.cfm/what_is_a_hospitalist_

[CC]

2. They have run the whole Health Care Industry

and have for a while now. The biggest part of the health care crisis IMHO.

[Beregond2]

3. I've worked in hospitals

off and on my whole life, and they were no better when health care professionals were running them. The problem isn't who or how, it's why. So long as the profit motive has any place in the world of medicine, it will be a mess.

[Karenina]

5. Bingo!

[TooBigaTent]

4. Add in the fact that most people going into medicine now are only in it for the money

(specializing in high-cost sub-fields rather than real patient care - so much so that med schools are offering enormous incentives to students who will go into family practice) and the situation is even worse than described.

When your old family doc retires, you are on your own.