Episode Details

For the past few shows and in a few coming up, we are circling our wagons around a theme: In healthcare in this country, there are two teams. One team is employers, taxpayers, patients … those trying to keep healthcare prices down. Then on the other team, we have those looking for healthcare prices to continue to go up, meaning, as just one example, some health systems and some hospitals.

There was a New York Times article recently, and Peter Hayes wrote an interesting comment about it on LinkedIn. He wrote:

"This article is troubling on so many levels and clearly demonstrates that patient health and well-being are not the top priority of many in healthcare leadership in our hospitals. Unfortunately, it is much more about patient revenue than patient health. … The non-profit status of our health facilities is a huge hidden tax and wealth transference from every taxpayer that is estimated to be about $39 billion annually."

Look, for sure, not talking about everybody in healthcare leadership here, and increasingly I'm kinda thinking we need to maybe have more than one word for hospitals and their leadership because lumping them all together into a homogenous blob is really unfair to those rural and safety net organizations contending with all kinds of adversities—which is very, very different in circumstance to those so-called "well-resourced" hospital chains in suburban markets really raking in the cash and virtue signaling in very well-resourced press campaigns.

And the irony of this whole thing is that a reason hospitals (that want to) get away with doubling down on profit-centric business models is actually their nonprofit status.

This is a major loophole. If you are a nonprofit, you get to be excluded from some of the powers of the FTC (Federal Trade Commission), for example. But then there's also the lack of financial discipline, as Mike Thompson puts it in the show today.

These nonprofit organizations have never had to run efficiently. They have never been asked to justify the new building or the other adds to their infrastructure that ultimately increase their costs of doing business in ways that, on the whole, might not benefit patient care.

And I say "might not benefit patient care" fairly confidently because there is absolutely no correlation between high prices and high quality in healthcare. In fact, it can just as easily be the opposite.

But if you overbuild and you buy too many MRI machines or whatever, then you gotta feed the beast. And then the downward spiral starts, and the anticompetitive, financially toxic behavior really kicks into high gear—which, again, is tough to regulate because our laws and legislation expect nonprofits to, you know, behave like nonprofits.

In this healthcare podcast, I am thrilled to speak with Mike Thompson, who is the CEO and president of the National Alliance of Healthcare Purchasers. Interestingly, Mike is an actuary by background; and I am sure that that has come in handy as more and more data is becoming available for purchasers and also regulators.

The National Alliance has created a