In sickness and in wealth : American hospitals in the twentieth century

American hospitals are a combination of public and private institutions that are at once charities and businesses, social welfare institutions and icons of U.S. science, wealth, and technical achievement. In Sickness and in Wealth helps us understand this huge and often contradictory "industry" and shows that throughout this century the voluntary not-for-profit hospitals have been profit-maximizing enterprises, even though they have viewed themselves as charities serving the community. Although our hospitals have provided the most advanced medical care for acutely sick and curable patients, they have been much less successful in meeting the needs of the chronically ill and the socially disadvantaged. That, Stevens concludes, is the next urgent task of social policy. American hospitals are unique: a combination of public and private institutions that are at once charities and businesses, social welfare institutions and icons of U.S. science, wealth, and technical achievement. In Sickness and in Wealth helps us understand this huge and often contradictory "industry" and shows that throughout this century the voluntary not-for-profit hospitals have been profit-maximizing enterprises, even though they have viewed themselves as charities serving the community. Although our hospitals have provided the most advanced medical care for acutely sick and curable patients, they have been much less successful in meeting the needs of the chronically ill and the socially disadvantage. That, Stevens concludes, is the next urgent ask of social policy. American hospitals are a combination of public and private institutions that are at once charities and businesses, social welfare instiutions and icons of US science, wealth and technical achievement. This volume seeks to help the reader understand this huge and often contradictory "industry" and shows that throughout this century the voluntary not-for-profit hospitals have been profit-maximizing enterprises, even though they have viewed themselves as charities serving the community. Although US hospitals have provided the most advanced medical care for acutely sick and curable patients, they have been much less successful in meeting the needs of the chronically ill and the socially disadvantaged. That, Stevens concludes, is the next urgent task of social policy 1. Introduction -- 2. Charities and businesses: hospitals in the early twentieth century -- 3. A national enterprise: setting basic rules -- 4. The case for cooperative medicine: World War I -- 5. Hospitals in the 1920s: the flowering of consumerism -- 6. The political creation of the voluntary ideal: hospitals during the Depression and the early New Deal -- 7. Technology and the workers: the genesis of Blue Cross -- 8. Consolidation without jeopardy: planning in the shadow of World War II -- 9. Pillars of respectable independence: the 1950s -- 10. The drive for reimbursement -- 11. Pragmatism in the marketplace: 1965-80 -- 12. Hospitals at the end of the twentieth century -- 13. The American hospital system in historical perspective. "Stevens brilliantly views the hospital as a prism of the values and mores of society . . . She sees the stratification of the hospital population into private, semi-private, and charity patients as a manifestation of the social stratifications of America MY FIRST EXPERIENCE with hospitals was as a child, seriously ill from scarlet fever in a hospital in Britain in 1945 before penicillin was generally available for civilians.