Selling Our Souls: The Commodification of Hospital Care in the United States
Adam D. Reich
Abstract
This book explores the contradictions inherent in one particular health care market—hospital care. Based on extensive interviews and observations across the three hospitals of one California city, the book examines the tensions embedded in the market for hospital care, how different hospitals manage these tensions, the historical trajectories driving disparities in contemporary hospital practice, and the perils and possibilities of various models of care. The book's three featured hospitals could not be more different in background or contemporary practice. PubliCare Hospital was founded in th ... More
This book explores the contradictions inherent in one particular health care market—hospital care. Based on extensive interviews and observations across the three hospitals of one California city, the book examines the tensions embedded in the market for hospital care, how different hospitals manage these tensions, the historical trajectories driving disparities in contemporary hospital practice, and the perils and possibilities of various models of care. The book's three featured hospitals could not be more different in background or contemporary practice. PubliCare Hospital was founded in the late nineteenth century as an almshouse in order to address the needs of the destitute. HolyCare Hospital was founded by an order of nuns in the mid-twentieth century, offering spiritual comfort to the paying patient. And GroupCare Hospital was founded in the late twentieth century to rationalize and economize care for middle-class patients and their employers. The book explains how these legacies play out today in terms of the hospitals' different responses to similar market pressures, and the varieties of care that result. The book is an in-depth investigation into how hospital organizations and the people who work in them make sense of and respond to the modern health care market.
Keywords:
health care,
hospital care,
market,
hospitals,
patients,
PubliCare Hospital,
HolyCare Hospital,
GroupCare Hospital
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2014 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780691160405 |
| Published to Princeton Scholarship Online: October 2017 |
DOI:10.23943/princeton/9780691160405.001.0001 |
