PROFIT AND NOT PROFIT HEALTHCARE ORGANIZATIONS

Compare and Contrast For-Profit and Not For Profit Healthcare Organizations

Compare and Contrast For-Profit and Not For Profit Healthcare Organizations

Nonprofit healthcare providers, such as hospitals, nursing homes and health protection plans, were established for charitable purposes, often by religious instructions. But with the spectacular rise in healthcare costs beginning in the 1980s, healthcare providers have progressively become for-profit businesses.

Background

As tax-exempt associations, nonprofit healthcare providers have an objective of assisting communities and providing care without consider for a patient's proficiency to pay. The economic base line of nonprofits is covered by charging more to patients who can pay bills, to cover those who can't. For-profit providers look at healthcare as a business, with a financial bottom line that produces profits distributed to shareholders (Wolfe, and Editor, 1999).

The Claims

For-profit wellbeing care providers assertion they are able to provide better care at smaller cost due to cost chopping and effectiveness. But detractors state for-profit providers are successful because they tend to serve affluent, insured patients and aim on highly lucrative specialties such as cardiology and elective surgery. At the same time, critics say, they avoid treating the uninsured and avoid providing emergency care, which often is used by poor patients for basic health needs. Farther, detractors inquiry if for-profit providers' focus on effectiveness and cost-cutting influences consumers' wellbeing negatively.

Performance

There is no clear clue that nonprofit clinics or for-profit clinics as a whole are better than the other. One study, a 2002 Canadian study of 26,000 U.S. clinics, did find that for-profit clinics had a 2 percent higher death rate than nonprofit hospitals. No other study has shown outcomes to be apparently better in nonprofit hospitals. But, surveys done by the U.S. Department of wellbeing & Human Services, as well as Consumer Reports.org, have shown that nonprofit nursing ...