Hospitals and Nursing Home Chains

The industrialization of episodic medicine was not the original intent of the market idealists of the early 1970s who favored health maintenance organizations. Many of them regard chain hospitals and emergicenters as the antithesis of what they had in mind. They wanted corporate involvement to change the nature of health care; it seems likely, in the foreseeable future, to reproduce the defects of the traditional system on a grander scale. —Paul Starr Professor of Sociology, Princeton University