Panel 6 — Does Profit Status Matter?

To help you get ready for the panel, here’s a list of questions to think about as you go through the book chapter and the Hospital Objective Functions slides. There’s nothing to turn in — just look them over so you’re ready to join in. The questions I put to the panel come from this list.

From the reading

You can find these in the chapter and slides.

  1. What are the main hospital ownership types, and roughly how common is each?
  2. What does not-for-profit status actually mean — what can and can’t such a hospital do with the surplus it earns?
  3. What does it mean to model a hospital as a “utility maximizer,” and what might enter that objective besides profit?
  4. What is the idea of a not-for-profit hospital behaving like a “for-profit in disguise”?
  5. In exchange for their tax exemption, what are not-for-profit hospitals expected to provide?

Bigger questions

No single right answer here — these are the ones we’ll talk through together.

  1. If a not-for-profit and a for-profit hospital end up behaving similarly, does ownership status still matter? For what?
  2. Not-for-profit hospitals get large tax breaks in exchange for “community benefit.” How would you judge whether they’re holding up their end?
  3. Besides profit, what might a hospital be trying to maximize — prestige, size, physician incomes, quality — and could you tell from the outside?
  4. Would you expect your care to differ at a for-profit versus a not-for-profit hospital? Why or why not?
  5. Should we care who owns a hospital, or only how it behaves?

Your take

Do you know whether the hospitals near you are for-profit, not-for-profit, or government-run — and would knowing change how you think about them? Anything from your own experience is welcome.