Morning Message 1.14

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Hey there everyone I’m intrepid ace reporter John Henry beaming you this encoded message from my undisclosed secret hideaway somewhere underneath the Mojave desert, and welcome to today’s Morning Message!

I’ve talked a lot over the years about the inherent conflicts of interest that exist in capitalism. The minute you start chasing profit or focusing on making money, you are compromising whatever it was you started off doing.

Time and again we’ve seen it – in criminal justice, in education, in journalism…and in health care. A couple of days ago MLive.Com published an investigative report about the profits generated by several hospital networks in the state, including one of the two major hospitals in my city.

Analyzing the records of a handful of non-profits (which are public by law) the investigation found significant profit increases during the pandemic. This isn’t entirely surprising, but does stand in stark contrast to the claims of massive losses by hospitals early on.

The story at Bronson Healthcare based in Kalamazoo and McLaren Health Care headquartered in Grand Blanc is similar to many stories in many sectors over the last few years. Corporations take in millions or billions of dollars, executive pay and bonuses skyrocket, prices go up, government subsidies are leveraged, etc.

It’s interesting to me that the story focuses on these two networks when they weren’t even the most profitable. I feel like the reporters are putting a lot of weight on the idea of non-profit status as though that magically means money isn’t necessary, and focusing on the $455m in profit growth from 2019-2022 at Bronson while not mentioning the $880 gained fifty miles up US-131 at Metropolitan Hospital in Grand Rapids strikes me as rather strange.

Mostly what’s interesting is that at no point do the reporters ask why we’ve allowed health care to become a thing that is money-dependent in the first place.

Focusing on the frankly exorbitant executive compensation packages and profit margins during an unprecedented and unpredictable moment in history seems to me to entirely miss the point. They edge closer in pointing out how many of these executives are specifically skilled in business and marketing rather than health care. It absolutely is important to know that public funds are in play and what’s being done with them.

Somehow lost in all of this is the basic question: why would we expect any other result in a system based on profit and capitalism? This is what money does to systems, regardless of whether they’re “non-profit” or not. If you have to focus on money, you’re not focusing on health care or education or whatever else.

Every other point of failure in this story starts there, but the reporters didn’t touch it. Instead they chose to recite a laundry list of offenses by these two systems while basically ignoring the rest – the only place in the article that the profits of other systems is discussed directly is an embedded map showing hospitals in the state and their profit growth or loss between 2019-2022. Similarly, the sheer reality that the real resources sufficient for a quality public health system do not exist was overlooked with only passing mention of staffing shortages during the peak of Covid.

We don’t have the personnel and material for a proper health care system in this country…because it’s all being done for money, and how do we save money or how do we make money or how do we pay more money for this hotshot executive or that one to come in and rearrange a few things to generate more money?

That’s the real story here, and it’s being overlooked in favor of a more sensational but less meaningful examination of two hospital networks’ finances…because that generates more interest, and therefore more eyeballs, and therefore more money. Again: the compromise.

Today’s morning message is simply this: whenever there’s money involved, all other core goals are compromised to some degree. It can’t be avoided. Keeping your eyes open to that can help you make better informed and more effective decisions when you’re asked to make that compromise.

That’s it for me, speaking of money please don’t forget that I’m entirely crowdfunded here so please do help out if you can via PayPal, Patreon, CashApp, lots of other options available and those are all linked at johnhenry.us/money, and as always the best support is your engagement so please do like, share, subscribe, and comment, and I will see you tomorrow with another Morning Message!