There can be pernicious motives whether a facility is nominally for profit or not.
(For instance, say there is a doctor who gets paid in proportion to the time they spend treating patients at a non profit facility)
(For instance, say there is a doctor who gets paid in proportion to the time they spend treating patients at a non profit facility)
This is colloquially known as "whataboutism".
The fact that there are other pernicious motives is completely irrelevant. For-profit medicine constitutes a pernicious motive -- that's the point.
I for one think it is very important that any attempts to prevent this behavior don't leave loopholes for non-profit hospitals, so keeping this in mind here is actually very important.
So my point is that you need external controls regardless of the motivations of the actors inside the institution.
It seems that they aren't the only difficulties you have. In a social health-care system, possession of a medical license doesn't entail one's employer. You're more than welcome to set up private practice, though you'll have less chance of the career defining cases, as the majority of patients will not be using your one-man-band practice. Thus many doctors in the UK, split their time between their private practice and public services. The only thing that's "de-facto" is the need to be qualified to treat people.
Doctors are still very well-paid in France, for instance. It's just that the hospital isn't expected to turn a profit.
They are both economic benefits from providing a valued product or service. Saying that the one is evil while ignoring the other doesn't make any sense at all. It's the opposite of being beside the point.
Take the case of 2 doctors that have the same price list. One is better at doctoring and sees more patients. Because there is only the other doctor, their faster appointments represent a higher income than the other doctor. The second doctor still manages to provide competent care to all the patients they see, but they are capturing less economic benefit than Dr. Speedy. Is Dr. Speedy evil for charging the going rate?
"This graph depicting
revenue reveals that
the maternity ward is
quite the cost center. It
should be going up and
to the right!
Smithers, why are there
so few pregnancies? We
need more in-patients,
otherwise our overhead
starts eating away at
our profits."
"Well, sir, I suppose
there aren't as many
teen pregnancies as
there used to be, and
with the benefit of
modern procedures, the
pregnancies we do see
are fairly uncomplicated..."
"Uncomplicated?! Why,
everyone knows live
vaginal births are the
devil's causeway. Those
infants can't be as
healthy as these so-
called 'doctors' seem
to believe. See to it
that more tests are
performed. I'm sure we
can find something wrong
with some of these
freeloaders."
"Hi, everybody!"I remember vividly when my grandmother was in an awful hospital in NYC dying, I found the hospitalist to talk about her situation. He claimed to not Treating her and had no idea who was and directed me to another doctor. Yet he was standing at the station, with my grandmother's chart open with marking that he had just added her condition.
He actually told me the truth, but he was sitting there with a stack of files defrauding Medicare. Whatever profit the hospital was or wasn't making, the doctor was ringing his till.