The board understands the economic realities of needing to operate in a financially responsible way. You are not going to always be able to build contemporary state-of-the-art facilities because you need to keep in mind that buildings don't take care of patients, people do. And when you get right down to it, we're not a production industry so much as we are an industry of people taking care of others.
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.