Hospitals and profit

Your Sunday article Hospitals: Profiteers or health providers? highlighted the need for a balance between social function and profit to improve quality. It is only the degree of profit that everybody would not agree upon, and here you have missed an important aspect of profiteering, namely, superfluous operations, prolonged hospitalization, the use of high technologies where not needed, redundant laboratory investigations and unnecessary medications.

All of these form an important fraction of general hospital costs, which contribute to the high profitability of modern hospitals.

The role of the government should be to contain these by auditing and determining if proper standards of professionalism are being applied in a field that most laymen do not understand. It is a matter of trust, and this is why people with money usually go abroad for health services.

People who are sick and helpless want a health service they can trust.

PROF. IWAN DARMANSJAH

University of Indonesia

Jakarta