But...but...but...I thought the free market was always better!?
For-profit nursing homes and hospitals on average provide an inferior quality of care compared with their nonprofit peers, according to an extensive review of studies published on Tuesday.
Authors writing in the journal Health Affairs found that a systematic analysis of 162 studies of nonprofit versus for-profit health care providers supports the concept that a facility's ownership status makes a difference in outcomes and in the cost of health care.
journal. [...]
In what they called the biggest review of the literature to date, authors reported that eight studies found nonprofit hospitals have lower mortality rates, versus one study finding for-profits have lower rates of death.
Nonprofit hospitals are also better at keeping costs down, the review found.
Meanwhile, free marketeers like Chuck Grassley have been musing over a legislative end to non-profit care centers. Unlike, say, megachurches, they apparently don't provide enough social benefit to justify their tax exempt status. Back to the study:
Nonprofits provide benefits that are not easy to quantify, the study argues. For example, it said, there is evidence that for-profits are more likely to mark up prices to maximize revenue and to have complaints lodged against them.
There is also evidence that nonprofits have a "spillover effect" in markets where they co-exist with for-profits, the study said. That is, they "enhance the quality and trustworthiness" of for-profits in a given market.
All this fits with the preponderance of the evidence: publicly provided care is better, profit incentives work perversely in medicine. We've talked before about the VA's superiority, but here you have the for-profit sector's inferiority. And yet, and yet, and yet the energy remains with the rightwing's effort to inject more privatization and risk into medicine. It's nuts.
Update: Can anyone explain this to me?
