In a for-profit operation, the stockholders or the owners decide whether the people running the company are doing a good job. There's no feedback loop like there is in a profit system. The community doesn't set your pay or hire or fire you. We try and make our revenues a little bit more than our expenses so that we have money left over at the end of every month to renew our property, our plant and our equipment. Our social mission plays out in several respects. Not only is it the charity care and the unream burst care that we provide, but it's also our investments in public health, in community wellness, and in prevention and early detection of disease call those
Steven Lipstein, President and CEO of BJC HealthCare--a $3 billion hospital system in St. Louis, Missouri--talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about the economics of hospitals. They discuss pricing, the advantages and disadvantages of specialization in modern medical care, and culture and governance of non-profit hospitals vs. for-profit hospitals. At the end they talk about the positives and negatives of a national health board patterned after the Federal Reserve.