No shit Sherlock!
You know what makes patients feel better too? Super large rooms with a lot of light, and designer furniture. Add quality meals and perhaps people will feel ok in hospitals...
You know what makes patients feel better too? Super large rooms with a lot of light, and designer furniture. Add quality meals and perhaps people will feel ok in hospitals...
I mentioned it to his cardiologist who, to his credit, went on a rant about how the food seems to be especially chosen to sabotage any work he does.
A quick Google of keywords (weight loss after cardiac surgery) shows papers with sentences like "Patients who lost weight faced a significantly increased risk of mortality than those who experienced no changes or gained weight after surgery", and "We conclude that obesity confers a survival advantage in the setting of the CABG surgery", "While various large-scale randomized controlled studies evaluated different post-operative nutrition strategies in rather mixed cohorts of critically ill patients, only few small clinical studies specifically investigated its effects in cardiac surgery patients. In these studies, malnutrition has been reported to increase morbidity and mortality after cardiac surgery".
I agree it is obvious that good food is best, but or hard to know what the actually constraints are. I think it is unlikely the NHS will put on a nice entrecôte de boeuf!
As USA founded/headquartered companies have taken over more of UK food production it \appears\ that this has been coincident with the increased usage of HFCS to sweeten traditional UK foods. That appearance is so strong that it is a stereotype in UK society "this tastes sickly sweet now, oh yeah, Kraft took over so they probably put corn-syrup in it".
It might just be that as USA capitalism has optimised squeezing more money out of lower quality food by adding cheaper ingredients other countries have optimised for financial profit in the same way?
I've never heard similar issues raised against the food industry of other countries; even so, perhaps it's an unwarranted stereotype?
I'm open if you want to try and change my view?
[Hmm, reading that back it's no longer clear to me what you are saying, I read your post as if the second sentence were a question; apologies if I erred.]
Most patients can’t afford their meds, or any type of hospital stay. They’re not paying a premium for extra square footage and art on the walls.
Ending that scam and asking patients to add an extra percent or two on their bills to pay for good food and a good environment would barely be a rounding error compared to the banditry that forces them to pay outrageous and unjustifiable fees for common meds and routine medical services - never mind specialised care.
I don’t mean to sound snarky here, but: if you believe you can boil down one of the most fractured, complex, and heavily regulated industries (really, set of inter-related industries) in the country to a single “that group of assholes over there cause all the problems” bulletpoint, you have missed 99% of the story.
There would be incidental costs, like more unemployment, and possibly some more admin within the healthcare system; though from what I hear it would more probably reduce admin costs on the healthcare end too.
Well, that's partially because they're legally required to spend 80% of premiums on patient care.
The end result is that higher premiums mean higher profits out of that fixed percentage of margin they're permitted to skim, so they don't fight cost increases too much - until people outright stop being able to afford the premiums, increases in them benefit the insurer's bottom line.
People see a lot of money flowing into insurers and hear about large profit numbers. That makes it feel like they're the obvious problem.
My politics aside - which on healthcare include both socialism and free market capitalism, to different degrees in different contexts - I really was just trying to communicate the straight fact, and I’m very appreciative of your recognition of that. In these discussions, it often seems like people assume that healthcare and associated amenities are created from thin air, and when less than ideal, are so due strictly to malice or indifference. Which couldn’t be further from the truth.