Opinion

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Healthy profits?

Saturday 18 February 2012

Should health care reform be left to investors? Anneke van der Sluis is a former hospital manager who thinks the minister should have the courage to tackle the job herself.

The introduction of profit in the healthcare system is a Trojan horse, says Van der Sluis in the Volkskrant.

Upping production and efficiency drives will be the investors' weapons of choice, inevitably resulting in higher premiums and staff cuts, she maintains.

Business

Van der Sluis has twenty years’ experience in the sector and remembers how, some 15 years ago, her hospital too became ‘a business’. ‘Top of the agenda was: how do we increase production. The elderly: a business opportunity! Potential clients needed to be made aware that they had a right to health care and needed to be apportioned their fully financed share of it even when it wasn’t really necessary.

New products are constantly being thought up by busy marketing departments, thinks Van Vliet. Meanwhile public money is spent on projects that never see the light of day.

Gastric band

Fastforwarding to 2012, Van Vliet tells of an evening on gastric band surgery organised by the privatised Slotervaart hospital in Amsterdam. ‘A real promotional meeting. Smooth talking specialists, an expensively made video, a good location: people were queuing up! In two years time the budget for this kind of operation has quadrupled, from 7.5 to 30m. This only the beginning. People are getting fatter and this is literally a growth market. Welcome tot the wonderful world op privatised health care!’

It’s not all bad, Van Vliet admits. The Ijsselmeer hospital is a good example of privatisation althought pressure on jobs was great and bankruptcy loomed. It got rid of the ‘stranglehold of specialists’ (‘do you know of any conflict between specialists and hospital boards where the board won?’) and 'rigid management structures'.

Cowardly

But a minister who can’t implement the necessary reforms herself and so leaves them in the hands of private investors is behaving cowardly, says Van Vliet. ‘It’s a big job and in the face of powerful opposition a very difficult one but it can be done without handing over our health care to bonus hunters whose only concern is money.

There’s nothing wrong with profit but it needs to be invested in clients and staff. Come on, minister Schippers, What they can do, you can do, and what’s more you can do it better. All it needs is a bit courage’, Van Vliet concludes.

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