How Hospitals Coddle the Rich | Hacker News Reader

How Hospitals Coddle the Rich

nytimes.com

5 pointsmillisecond4 comments

"But if we don’t challenge the necessity of luxury services, then we have accepted that hospitals — and medicine in general — prosper in part because they cater to the wealthy."

My wife and I paid for private medical care when we had our children. The result was better care, less stress, and better outcomes for all of us. Perhaps that was 'luxury' care relative to public healthcare, but it was worth every cent.

I don't quite get the thrust of the article.

(You don't say what country you're in.)

Before you paid for private healthcare: what information on patient safety did you look at?

To be honest I don't remember the details. The key differentiators that I remember were:

* longer stay in the private hospital * private rooms * better ratio of staff to patients * easier access to useful services (physio, breast feeding consultants, etc.) * specialist assistance like breastfeeding courses and the like, if needed

As it happens our first child was born by emergency C-section after a nasty fall and partial placenta abrupta, so we really tested them :) Everything went very well.

I was suprised by the second birth, because that was a 'normal' C-section. People were laughing, chatting etc. and it was a much less "game face ON" environment than the first. I'd probably have noticed the tension more if I'd been paying more attention to anything other than my wife at the time.

The biggest danger I see is not of doctors or nurses intentionally shortchanging other patients, but of being less immediately available when something unexpected happens. Seconds can count. If somebody is on that luxury top floor answering extra questions for a VIP patient, and has to hustle downstairs to handle an emerging crisis, they haven't exactly done anything wrong but the difference in outcomes might still be huge.

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