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Comment by refurb | Hacker News Reader

I mean, isn't that entirely expected? If more care is needed, hospital revenues and profits increase, so executive gets bonuses?

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It's still sad to see this level of exploitation while the pictures of corpses in trucks is still in memory.

Of course, we still remember the governor of New York claiming that PPE was walked in the front door of hospitals and walked out the back door of hospitals by employees ripping it off...

To have read the article and responded with such a simplistic assessment leaves me puzzled.

If by "simplistic" you mean "how things work and how people expect them to work", then yeah, "simplistic" I guess.

Simplistic in the sense that the health economy is much more complex than your Econ 101 take.

Is it? How so?

Reading the fine article would give you a starting point to answer that

I did read it, but didn't see anything on how "healthcare doesn't follow the rules of a normal business".

Can you elaborate on what you meant?

When staffing and equipment levels take a huge hit, give large amounts of money to a small number of people rather than invest it in solving the major problems it's facing? That is profoundly stupid. So is running a hospital like a business.

Clearly those problems didn't impact hospital revenues, which increased dramatically leading to increased bonuses.

And hospital who didn't pay out those bonuses had those problems as well.

Did you read the article? Those problems didn't impact hospital revenues because they were handed billions in emergency funding from the government.

Right, but they also used those revenues to treat Covid patients?

and then skimmed a large bucket for themselves.

It's simple greed and profiteering. That's where the outrage comes from. And it was government (your) money.

How is it greed? The hospital did more services and received more income, thus the executives got bigger bonuses.

I'm not sure it matters if the income was from the government, since 50%+ of all healthcare is paid by the government in normal times.

At the very least, we shouldn't have been hearing one word about how the hospital system was supposedly stretched to its limits (which was the whole justification for extending "15 days to slow the spread" into "lockdown until we have a vaccine") while there was still money and resources to pay these bonuses.

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