For anyone who has searched for new health insurance during the recent open enrollment period, one thing stands out: prices are going up, even for those who don't use a lot of health care or have bare-bones plans.
There are any number of reasons/excuses for such price hikes. But the biggest factor is delivering health care just keeps getting more expensive.
Okay, sure. But that's not the only cost driver. One highly unsavory reason for higher costs? Hospitals – many of them nonprofits – looking to squeeze every penny they can out of patients and personnel. The upshot? Fat profit margins.
But there are also potentially life-threatening problems for some patients, and diminished, if not rationed, care for others. Consider this example…
According to an investigative report in The New York Times, one nonprofit hospital chain turned to robots to deliver “care” that nurse's aides once provided:
Traditionally, Ascension, like other hospitals, sent nurses' aides into the rooms of patients who needed close supervision. Left untended, these patients, many with dementia or psychiatric illnesses, might get out of bed and hurt themselves.
But in the years before the pandemic, some Ascension hospitals switched course. Going forward, they would generally assign nurses' aides only to patients who were deemed at high risk of dying by suicide.
For other patients, aides would be replaced by AvaSure's “TeleSitters.” By 2019, Ascension had installed 450 of the robots in more than 50 of its hospitals. The devices — essentially a video camera mounted on a metal pole — send live footage to an off-site command center, where workers talk to patients through speakers in the machine.
Each robot could watch several patients. If a problem arose, the command center would call the hospital to get a person in to provide help.
Except in the case, The Times' notes, the hospital staff that would have answered the phones had been laid off.
There's a great deal in this piece, and you should read it all. A major takeaway: the incentives for allegedly (and legally!) nonprofit hospitals to maximize profits has create perverse incentives that in turn are creating enormous health problems (and costs that are transferred through health insurance premiums to the rest of us).
This is a tragedy, a scandal, and a threat all rolled into one. And there's little indication government is interested in correcting it.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of American Liberty News.
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