Hospitals' Dilemma...?

St. Vincent's Hospital in Manhattan closed in 2010. 

Mount Sinai Beth Israel, an 825-bed hospital, served downtown Manhattan for more than 125 years, will close. It will be replaced by a much smaller building of 70 beds with an emergency department several blocks away. It will also include expanded outpatient facilities at three sites with more than 35 operating and procedure rooms and 16 physician practice locations to be used by over 600 doctors.

At its core, health care was just too costly, said Dr. Kenneth L. Davis, president and chief executive of the Mount Sinai Health System.

“We have the macroeconomics of health care which is that it is unaffordable for everyone,” Dr. Davis said in an interview. Beth Israel, he said, stood to lose $2 billion in the next 10 years because of changes in federal reimbursement structures alone.

Dr. Davis said large hospitals were also no longer the most efficient vehicles for delivering care, in part because of medical advances. 

The Mount Sinai system said in a statement that it would invest $500 million in changing the way it delivered health care and that it was “committed to retraining and placing” as many of its current employees as possible elsewhere in the system. Every union job had been guaranteed.

Big and small Pharma price their medications thousands of folds what it is. Importation of medications is not allowed...  Many hospitals either closed or overhauled the operation since 2000.
 
Politicians should look for a long term solution not just talk.

Just  a thought.