For profit ...

Illustration by Mel Haasch; Photographs by Taylor Glascock for The New York Times

It's all about the money/rev XX. This time it's "non-profit" hospitals and the bottom line as you gotta make money, right? When reading the excellent NYTimes piece titled How a Sprawling Hospital Chain Ignited Its Own Staffing Crisis, one sees how the profit nexus compromises not only patients but also doctors and nursers in the endless pursuit of money. Ask any doc or nurse this question. Do you like the system you work under? The answer, overwhelmingly, is no, spiced with appropriate epithets as insurance and the profit motive runs HC with disastrous consequences unless you're lucky and have access to competent HC along with a good insurance policy. If not, death becomes a viable option due to the fact the US lacks a universal healthcare environment along the lines of France, Germany, Canada and Japan.

To whit

At a hospital in a Chicago suburb last winter, there were so few nurses that psychiatric patients with Covid were left waiting a full day for beds, and a single aide was on hand to assist with 32 infected patients. Nurses were so distraught about the inadequate staffing that they banded together to file formal complaints every day for more than a month.

About 300 miles away, at a hospital outside Flint, Mich., similar scenes were unfolding. Chronic understaffing meant that patients languished in dried feces, while robots replaced nursing assistants who would normally sit with mentally impaired patients.

Both hospitals are owned by one of the country’s largest health systems, Ascension. It spent years reducing its staffing levels in an effort to improve profitability, even though the chain is a nonprofit organization with nearly $18 billion of cash reserves.

But a New York Times investigation has found that hospitals helped lay the groundwork for the labor crisis long before the arrival of the coronavirus. Looking to bolster their bottom lines, hospitals sought to wring more work out of fewer employees. When the pandemic swamped hospitals with critically ill patients, their lean staffing went from a financial strength to a glaring weakness.

For profit ... rules.