The hospitals would know what they would receive, receive incremental payments monthly for providing services, and thus be able to better serve the populations they have already been serving. With regional funding, based upon patient load and acuity, such hospitals could render far better services. My contention is that we spend far too much for health care without organizing it in such a way as to make the dollars make sense, health-wise. With the increase in global warming, the diseases such as West Nile Virus and expanding areas of malaria, AIDS, Ebola and others are going to require a much more effectively integrated health system to do the job that public health did in the early 1900s, in addition to providing the sophisticated technologies at reasonable prices. We need to realize public profits on drugs that we helped fund, and the pharmaceutical industries charge excessively for.
Brazil is an example, currently.
The issue is also raising its head in southern Africa and else where. Then, there is the fair return on investment on behalf of communities which have contributed the building of hospitals through a variety of means, including taxes. These are being bought up for a song by the health conglomerates to the detriment of many large and small community hospitals. Health care is too important to the well-being of the nation to be left to the vagaries of the market place. It clearly does not increase services in places of greatest need.