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There are plenty of reasons to eschew short term profitability for long term profitability and prevent flooding the market. Fwiw my information is gleaned from

There are plenty of reasons to eschew short term profitability for long term profitability and prevent flooding the market. Fwiw my information is gleaned from "An American Sickness" where the Harvard MD writer claims that a resident costs something like 180k but makes the hospital 300k. If it is the case that the author has intentionally neglected to mention other factors that contribute to a resident being a cost center, I would sincerely be interested to learn about this.

chimeracoder 9y ago
> There are plenty of reasons to eschew short term profitability for long term profitability and prevent flooding the market. That's not what we're talking about. What people are proposing here is literally that hospitals are eschewing short-term profit in order to increase the expenses they have to pay in the long-term (physician salaries).
rayiner 9y ago
> There are plenty of reasons to eschew short term profitability for long term profitability and prevent flooding the market. Pretty much in any industry, participants could collude to reduce supply to keep up prices. In practice, such arrangements are highly unstable, because individual participants have huge incentives to break rank and seek short-term profitability. What makes you think hospitals are different?
- chimeracoder 9y ago
  > Pretty much in any industry, participants could collude to reduce supply to keep up prices. In practice, such arrangements are highly unstable, because individual participants have huge incentives to break rank and seek short-term profitability. In addition to everything you said (which is true), in this case, the hospitals and doctors have opposing incentives. I can't imagine why hospital administrators would collude to increase their expenses (ie, their employees' salaries). When Apple, Google, etc. were found to be fixing wages, they were trying to keep salaries down, not bring them up.

chimeracoder 9y ago

> There are plenty of reasons to eschew short term profitability for long term profitability and prevent flooding the market. That's not what we're talking about. What people are proposing here is literally that hospitals are eschewing short-term profit in order to increase the expenses they have to pay in the long-term (physician salaries).

rayiner 9y ago

> There are plenty of reasons to eschew short term profitability for long term profitability and prevent flooding the market. Pretty much in any industry, participants could collude to reduce supply to keep up prices. In practice, such arrangements are highly unstable, because individual participants have huge incentives to break rank and seek short-term profitability. What makes you think hospitals are different?

chimeracoder 9y ago
> Pretty much in any industry, participants could collude to reduce supply to keep up prices. In practice, such arrangements are highly unstable, because individual participants have huge incentives to break rank and seek short-term profitability. In addition to everything you said (which is true), in this case, the hospitals and doctors have opposing incentives. I can't imagine why hospital administrators would collude to increase their expenses (ie, their employees' salaries). When Apple, Google, etc. were found to be fixing wages, they were trying to keep salaries down, not bring them up.