Nonprofit Health Care Often Better: Study

What moreis it going to take, people, before we take back out nation and its capitol?

Nonprofit Health Care Often Better: Study:

"For-profit nursing homes and hospitals on average provide an inferior quality of care compared with their nonprofit peers, according to an extensive review of studies published on Tuesday.

Authors writing in the journal Health Affairs found that a systematic analysis of 162 studies of nonprofit versus for-profit health care providers supports the concept that a facility's ownership status makes a difference in outcomes and in the cost of health care.

'Their work should lay to rest claims that little distinguishes nonprofit versus for-profit health care,' University of Michigan professor Jill Horwitz wrote in editorial also running in the policy journal.

The analysis found a pattern of differences between nonprofits and for-profits in cost, quality and accessibility, said Bradford Gray, a principal research associate at the Urban Institute -- a nonprofit research group -- and lead study author.

For-profit ownership is climbing in most sectors of health, from hospitals to hospice care. For example, for-profit hospitals accounted for 11 percent of all hospitals in the early 1990s and now account for 16 percent.
HCA Inc. is the biggest U.S. hospital chain, with about 180 hospitals and $24 billion in revenue, and is for- profit. The third-biggest hospital chain by number of facilities, after the U.S. Veterans Affairs Department, is Tenet Healthcare Corp., also for-profit."