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Comment by interactivecode | Hacker News Reader

Again why do we need hospitals to make money? Aren't national expenses like healthcare a good place to use taxes for?

We don't need them to. 62% of hospitals in the US are non-profit, and an additional 20% are run by the government. Only 18% are for-profit. In some states, like New York and Minnesota, there are no for-profit hospitals.

Tons of people getting rich as fuck at those non-profit hospitals though.

Yes, if you want good people you have to pay market rates.

Some people in the medical profession may be willing to work for less money for a charitable cause, but not enough to run entire hospital systems.

Non-profit doesn't mean you don't make a profit, and doesn't mean you behave more ethically than for-profit hospitals.

Example: https://www.propublica.org/article/methodist-le-bonheur-heal...

The real money is in insurance. From what I can tell, this is the cancer in our system, and the hospitals take more than their share of the blame.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UnitedHealth_Group

I'm not in the US and it is staggering to see how much one hospital take in just one single hospital.

Tisch Hospital New York NY Net patient revenue 2022 $6,273,707,636

Without the number of patients, this number is fairly meaningless. The hospitals can be and often are huge.

The funding for my entire Canadian province for all healthcare; two main hospitals, two small hospitals, a dozen clinics, a few nursing homes for one year is $850 million. So that single US hospital takes in over 7X more than we get per year to run it all.

Because we don't want them to be bureaucracies that grow and grow without providing increasingly good service.

If you can solve the problem of state agencies becoming insanely inefficient (mostly due to lack of incentive to be efficient, I suppose), you'll make everyone happy.

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