Medical Malpractice

What if all hospitals in America consolidated and created one private hospital system?

Like Walmart or something. Would that help lower prices? Or maybe not all hospitals, but a large group of hospitals, so that there is competition, like Target and Walmart, but for the healthcare industry.

Public Comments

1. Why don't you rabble just put a maple leaf on your flag while you're at it.
2. Total chaos & thousands of layoffs
3. In some areas of health care they already are. The VA, for example????
4. A private system would create competition and causes prices to fall...drastically. Like everything else the private sector is in. Don't think socialist want that though. They'll see the collapse of the United States happens first.
5. Prices would go up without competition. If they were selling goods rather than services I could see prices going down (like Wal-Mart).
6. That would be impossible, Hospitals are not all alike. I know I build them as a business. It is possible to have a universal health system but not hospital. The reason is as a for profit society it would mean the building of all hospitals and the management of them would be sponsored by someone or thing like a government or agency. It would be enormous and would have to be equal for children as well as for men and women. Today’s healthcare isn't even equal for children or for men or women because all three as well as the aged have different needs and requirements. It can be done but it would mean a universal healthcare system. Trust me today's Republicans and Democrats have no stomach or heart for such an experiment.
7. That's apples and oranges. Besides, one of the biggest problems and contributors to the high cost of medical care is government involvement. Even doing as you say, government involvement in the provision of medical care will always contribute significantly to the cost of medical care.
8. ehhhh, healthcare is different from commodities. the best way to lower costs is to encourage healthy lifestyles and reduce risk... actuaries would factor this into insurance rates... lower risks, lower prices
9. It would lower prices, but the quality suffers. DUring the CLinton era, Hillary forced the Hospital to cut cost. They began merging, but Nosocomial deaths sharply rised. What we are seeing now with Obamacare is the same thing. Hospital merger's are once again merging to cut cost. The other issue is to big to fail. Large corporations are far more willing to perform large scale corruption. Tennet Hospitals dominated California, and they end up being broken up for medicare fraud. Prime Healthcare is now replacing them, and they are notoriously evil. The government is only begining to look at them. There are primarily two esoteric labs in the US . They were both sued for Medical fraud. Quest made a record settlement recently of about a quarter billion dollars. Both labs quality sucks as well. They use their size to bring down cost by driving the cost of labor down, but it also means they hire the least qualified. People see the sucky pay, and decide to move on to a different industry. Unfortunately there are too many areas in medicine that are underpaid, and it drives down quality. On the other hand those who are well paid has huge shortage, partly due to shortage of schools. I believe there is only one autopsy tech school and it's in the east coast.