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In a Madison Avenue spirit, hospitals play games with words. Blue Cross and most other insurers pay for a semiprivate room. In many hospitals, this may turn out to be a room with four beds, making it a demi-semiprivate room.
Occupancy rates are as important to hospitals as to hotels. Counting the overhead, it may cost the hospital upwards of $40 a day to maintain a semiprivate bed even when it is empty. It costs only about $3 to $5 a day more when the bed is occupied—that being the charge for the patient's meals. But an empty bed earns nothing, while an occupied bed earns dollars. Therefore, while virtually no surgery is performed on weekends, it is common practice to admit surgery patients on Friday. That keeps the bed filled, profitably for the hospital, until Sunday, when the patient gets his first dose of medicine to prepare him for Monday's workup in preparation for Tuesday's operation.
Much more that is done to the patient in the hospital is scheduled with no consideration for him. What the medical staff intends as superefficiency seems, by the time it explodes around the patient, merely frenetic, and is highly discomforting. "They woke me up to give me a sleeping pill" may be an apocryphal com plaint. But it is still common practice to awaken a patient at 4 a.m. in order to feed him one of his countless, multicolored pills, and perhaps again an hour or two later for a thermometer reading or a hypodermic shot. These universal complaints, though seemingly petty, are symptomatic of the depersonalized atmosphere of too many hospitals. Equally distressing is the noise, which makes sleep or even rest far too difficult.
Motels Motels and and Half-Half-Way Way Houses Houses
With rare exceptions, every commu nity medical hospital and is an surgical empire staffs in itself. demand — Its and get — costly equipment and facilities for their exclusive use, regardless of whether another hospital down the block already has them lying idle two-thirds of the time. In Miami, the VA hospital has a $100,000 linear accelerator for the radiation treatment of cancer, but Cedars of Lebanon Hospital is installing its own. Neither will be used at any ners" where in near Los capacity. Angeles, At on North "hospital cor Ver mont Avenue and Sunset and Beverly Boulevards, are four cobalt-60 radiation units, also for cancer, where one, or at most two, would do.
Hospital planners have been arguing for years that the crisis-care hospital for the acutely ill patient is only one part of the complex that is needed.
There should be, they say, a motel-type unit to which a man can drive his own car when he goes in for a checkup, where he can live like a healthy human being and go to the cafeteria for his meals, merely following his doctor's diet instructions. At the other end of the line, there should be a halfway house for patients not quite ready to