The Case Against For-Profit Hospitals
Leon Eisenberg M.D.1
1 Harvard Medical School, 25 Shattuck Street, Boston, Massachusetts 02115
The author argues that for-profit hospitals threaten the integrity of the health care system because they are designed to maximize charges and profits rather than equity and quality. He discusses the most detrimental results of an unrestrained profit motive: higher costs, skimming off of patients on whom money can be made and dumping of poor patients onto public hospitals, consumption of the products of medical education and research without contribution to their costs, stockholders who are unanswerable to the community of users, and undue political and economic power. Physicans must, the author believes, enter the public debate to protect the goal of medical care: the maximization of the population.
