How nonprofits matter in American medecine

Schlesinger, M. and Bradford, H. (2006). How nonprofits matter in American Medicine, and what to do about it. Health Affairs 25, w287-w303.

Arguments in favour of for-profit organizations:
1. "There is overwhelming evidence that for-profit nursing homes have lower costs and greater efficiency"
2. "Nonprofit health care providers are slower to react to change, expanding capacity less quickly when demand rises and dropping services or withdrawing from markets less frequently when profitability declines."

Arguments in favour of nonprofit organizations:
1. "Ownership-related differences in adverse health events within facilities are far more pronounced in nursing homes than hospitals." The nonprofit nursing homes generally providing a better quality of care.
2. "Nonprofit organizations appear more trustworthy in delivering services, being less likely to make misleading claims, to have complaints lodged against them by patients, and to treat vulnerable patients differently from other clientele."
3. "Nonprofits are typically the incubators of innovation (for example, health maintenance organizations, or HMOs, during the 1930s or hospice three decades ago), using philanthropy and cross-subsidies to finance the development of services for which there is not yet a market."