TOPIC-#13p22-23_A primer in Hospital Economics
As privately-owned for-profit business, hospitals depended on their patients being personally able to pay their hospital bills. But hospital bills are not the same straight-forward financial transaction as the purchase of most other services. By definition, hospitalized people (i.e. patients) are sick, injured, crazy or infected with communicable diseases. As a demographic, hospitalized patients are not able to generate income. If they are really ill or injured, require a lot of intensive and expensive medical and nursing care. Even worse, a significant number of hospital patients die without having first paid their hospital bill.
Sick people are the very worst demographic to depend on as paying customers. As an economic adventure, it became increasingly clear that technically enriched 20th century hospitals could no more depend on 100% of the seriously ill or injured to pay 100% of the cost of their care. The conclusion was inescapable — there were not enough sick people (as paying customers) to support the 20th century practice of medicine as a technologically-enhanced medical science.
As a result, many small and medium-sized hospitals were just barely squeaking by. ????????
