Where you stand depends on where you sit

I know from personal interactions that the CEO of Steward Health Care System has an excellent sense of humor.  But he certainly cannot have meant to be funny when he appeared at the state health cost trends hearings hosted last week by the state Health Policy Commission and appealed to the state to enact more health cost containment legislation that would further limit prices for higher-cost doctors and hospitals.  Julie Donnelly at the Boston Business Journal summarized:The demand for additional regulation is somewhat unusual given that de la Torre is the CEO of one of the few for-profit health systems in the state, a company owned by private equity firm Cerberus Capital Management. De la Torre says that new government intervention is needed to fix a broken market that makes it difficult for Steward to compete.“We not comparing (the price of) liver transplants, we don’t provide them and we don’t care,” de la Torre said at the hearing. “But CT scans, MRIs, hernias – there’s price disparity that creates unfair competition.” Wait, I thought that disparity was the basis for the Steward's business model.  Let's look back a few months.  As Bruce Mohl in Commonwealth Magazine reported in July 2012:At a time when private insurers and state and federal regulators are trying to rein in the cost of health care, Steward thinks its cost advantage over teaching hospitals gives it a significant competitive edge. “Our model is very disrupt...
Source: Running a hospital - Category: Health Managers Source Type: blogs