There is an army of consultants running around hospitals. A whole phalanx of firms is there to improve revenue, improve compensation, and get a piece of the pie. Ten to 15 percent of revenue goes to billing and collection companies and contractors to do things like claims and preapproval—those jobs don’t even exist in Europe. And hospitals go to Wall Street for bond issues to build new wings, so the bankers are at the trough, too. We have so much surplus capacity, which should lead to falling prices. But instead we get the opposite: It’s a market failure, but it follows certain logic. This is
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