Designing HIGH-COST medicine: hospital surveys, health planning, and the paradox of progressive reform.

Abstract

Inspired by social medicine, some progressive US health reforms have paradoxically reinforced a business model of high-cost medical delivery that does not match social needs. In analyzing the financial status of their areas' hospitals, for example, city-wide hospital surveys of the 1910s through 1930s sought to direct capital investments and, in so doing, control competition and markets. The 2 national health planning programs that ran from the mid-1960s to the mid-1980s continued similar strategies of economic organization and management, as did the so-called market reforms that followed. Consequently, these reforms promoted large, extremely specialized, capital-intensive institutions and systems at the expense of less complex (and less costly) primary and chronic care. The current capital crisis may expose the lack of sustainability of such a model and open up new ideas and new ways to build health care designed to meet people's health needs.