Are Hospitals Becoming Obsolete?
New York Times
By Ezekiel J. Emanuel
February 25, 2018
Hospitals are disappearing. While they may never completely go away, they will continue to shrink in number and importance. That is inevitable and good.
The reputation of hospitals has had its ups and downs. Benjamin Rush, a surgeon general of the Continental Army, called the hospitals of his day the “sinks of human life.” Through the 19th century, most Americans were treated in their homes. Hospitals were a last resort, places only the very poor or those with no family went. And they went mainly to die.
Then several innovations made hospitals more attractive. Anesthesia and sterile techniques made surgery less risky and traumatic, while the discovery of X-rays in 1895 enhanced the diagnostic powers of physicians. And the understanding of germ theory reduced the spread of infectious diseases.
Middle- and upper-class Americans increasingly turned to hospitals for treatment. Americans also strongly supported the expansion of hospitals through philanthropy and legislation.
Today, hospitals house M.R.I.s, surgical robots and other technological wonders, and at $1.1 trillion they account for about a third of all medical spending. That’s nearly the size of the Spanish economy.
And yet this enormous sector of the economy has actually been in decline for some time.
Consider this: What year saw the maximum number of hospitalizations in the United States? The answer is 1981.
That might surprise you. That year, there were over 39 million hospitalizations — 171 admissions per 1,000 Americans. Thirty-five years later, the population has increased by 40 percent, but hospitalizations have decreased by more than 10 percent. There is now a lower rate of hospitalizations than in 1946. As a result, the number of hospitals has declined to 5,534 this year from 6,933 in 1981.
This is because, in a throwback to the 19th century, hospitals now seem less therapeutic and more life-threatening. In 2002, researchers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimated that there were 1.7 million cases of hospital-acquired infections that caused nearly 100,000 deaths. Other problems — from falls to medical errors — seem too frequent. It is clear that a hospital admission is not a rejuvenating stay at a spa, but a trial to be endured. And those beeping machines and middle-of-the-night interruptions are not conducive to recovery.