Healing Our Health Care System. - book reviews

Healthcare Financial Management, June, 1991 by Don R. Harrison

Healing Our Health Care System

By Leonard Abramson Grove Weidenfeld New York, N.Y., 1990 142 Pages, $17.95

This book contains, in this reviewer's opinion, some of the most outrageous statements in healthcare publishing. It has 15 short chapters, each devoted to a single subject with an average length of 81/2 pages. The author appears so eager to criticize and castigate those involved in health care that he moves quickly from one subject to the next.

The author's first target is hospitals. He states that the nation's correctional facilities treat prisoners better than hospitals treat sick people. The author asserts that "[h]ospitals have never developed their policies and procedures around the patient' and "it is all too clear that the physician is the only real customer of any concern to the hospital."

After a historical review of hospitals that begins with the first century A.D., the author says that misdirected goals by hospitals, high costs, and lack of quality services "demonstrate how our society condones and even accepts cheating' in our healthcare system." He accuses public accounting firms of helping hospitals "contrive to squeeze out more money from the federal government and third-party payers than they actually deserve or account for."

In a chapter devoted to the not-for-profit myth," the author denounces the not-for-profit healthcare structure, calling it a contradiction and hypocrisy. "Most of these nonprofit organizations maximize the reimbursement for hospital services and premium costs as much as for-profit organizations," he says.

According to this rationale, if hospitals learn how to bill effectively and efficiently, they are cheaters. And, if not-for-profit hospitals bill the same as for-profit facilities, they are hypocrites. The author's lack of understanding of the healthcare system is so apparent and complete that nothing further needs to be said. Nor is the book recommended reading.

Reviewed by Don R. Harrison, CPA, vice president, finance, St. Marys-Rogers Memorial Hospital, Rogers, Ark.