On 10/4/06, David B. Shemano <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
In my capacity as a bankruptcty lawyer, I have been involved in the huge restructuring of hospitals that has taken place over the past couple of years in Southern California. Multiple hospitals and emergency rooms no longer exist.<
I'll let some expert on health economics comment on the rest, but the closing of emergency rooms is a standard phenomenon of this kind of competition at a time when hospitals have shifted over to a more for-profit orientation. At a time when the lack of health insurance is driving more and more people to the emergency rooms for care that should have come earlier, the emergency room at a hospital is a high-loss center. So "reasonable" administrators close the emergency room, perhaps because of the financial problems faced by the hospital and perhaps because of the need for profits. This causes an externality: it dumps the cost of a bunch of patients on other hospitals. So those emergency rooms become even more loss-prone. So they close... -- Jim Devine / "it is all the more clear what we have to accomplish at present: I am referring to ruthless criticism of all that exists, ruthless both in the sense of not being afraid of the results it arrives at and in the sense of being just as little afraid of conflict with the powers that be." -- KM
