Forewarned is Forearmed

http://heartscanblog.blogspot.com/2008/10/increasing-sales-growing-business.html

So how would a business manager view you as a heart disease patient?

"The lesson that “once a heart patient, always a heart patient” has been honed to an art form in business practices at St. Matthews and other hospitals like it. If you enter the system through your primary care physician or cardiologist, there’s an excellent chance you’ll end up with several procedures, diagnostic and therapeutic, over the ensuing years. Accordingly, St. Matthews provides a very attentive after-discharge follow-up program, complete with access to friendly people, phone centers, “support groups,” and even an occasional festive get-together, all in an effort to ensure future return to the system. 

All in all, the St. Matthews Hospital System is a hugely successful operation. It provides jobs for thousands of area residents and provides high-tech, high-quality healthcare. Like any business—and no doubt about it, St. Matthews is a business with all the trappings of a profit-seeking enterprise—it grows to serve its own interests. The tobacco industry didn’t grow to its gargantuan proportions by doing good, but by selling a product to an unsuspecting public. So, too, hospitals.

Curiously, hospitals like St. Matthews continue to operate under the sheltered guise of not-for-profit institution with the associated tax benefits, ostensibly serving the public good. This means that all end-of-year excess revenues are re-invested and not distributed to investors. But non-profit does not mean that individuals within the system can’t benefit, and benefit handsomely. Under St. Matthews’ non-profit umbrella, many businesses thrive: 35 pharmacies, extended care facilities to provide care after hospital discharge, drug and medical device distributors, even a venture capital arm to fund new operations. The financial advantage conferred by “non-profit” status has permitted the hospital to compete with other, for-profit businesses, at a considerable advantage. For this reason, attempts have been made over the years to strip them of what some believe is an unfair advantage; all have failed. "