And maybe it’s not. The big mistake people make is hearing non-profit and think it means there’s a greater amount of morality. It’s the same mistake as assuming everyone who is religious is therefore more moral (worth pointing out that religions are nonprofits as well).
Most hospitals are nonprofits, yet they still make substantial profits and overcharge customers. People are still people, and still have motives; they don't suddenly become more moral when they join a non-prof board. In many ways, removing a motive that has the most direct connection to quantifiable results (profit) can actually make things worse. Anyone who has seen how nonprofits work know how dysfunctional they can be.
Are you talking about American hospitals?
In addition, public hospitals still charge for their services, it's just who pays the bill that changes, in some nations (the government as the insuring body vs a private insuring body or the individual).
They don't make large profits otherwise they wouldn't be nonprofits. They do have massive revenues and will find ways to spend the money they receive or hoard it internally as much as they can. There are lots of games they can play with the money, but experiencing profits is one thing they can't do.
This is a common misunderstanding. Non-profits/501(c)(3) can and often do make profits. 7 of the 10 most profitable hospitals in the U.S. are non-profits[1]. Non-profits can't funnel profits directly back to owners, the way other corporations can (such as when dividends are distributed). But they still make profits.
But that's besides the point. Even in places that don't make profits, there are still plenty of personal interests at play.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/20/opinion/nonprofit-hospita...
I've only really been close to one (the owner of the small company i worked at started one), and in the past I did some consulting work for anther, but that describes what I saw in both situations fairly aptly. There seems to be a massive amount of power and ego wrapped up in the creation and running these things from my limited experience. If you were invited to a board, that's one thing, but it takes a lot of time and effort to start up a non-profit, and that's time and effort that could be spent towards some other existing non-profit usually, so I think it's relevant to consider why someone would opt for the much more complicated and harder route than just donating time and money to something else that helps in roughly the same way.
Profit is money that ends up in the bank to be used later. Compensation is what gets spent on yachts. Anything spent on hospital supplies is an expense. This stuff matters.
Then where do these profits go?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/501(c)_organization
"Religious, Educational, Charitable, Scientific, Literary, Testing for Public Safety, to Foster National or International Amateur Sports Competition, or Prevention of Cruelty to Children or Animals Organizations"
However, many other forms of organizations can be non-profit, with utterly no implied morality.
Your local Frat or Country Club [ 501(c)(7) ], a business league or lobbying group [ 501(c)(6), the 'NFL' used to be this ], your local union [ 501(c)(5) ], your neighborhood org (that can only spend 50% on lobbying) [ 501(c)(4) ], a shared travel society (timeshare non-profit?) [ 501(c)(8) ], or your special club's own private cemetery [ 501(c)(13) ].
Or you can do sneaky stuff and change your 501(c)(3) charter over time like this article notes. https://stratechery.com/2023/openais-misalignment-and-micros...
So yeah, Mayo Cinic makes a $2B profit. That is not money going to shareholders though, that's funds for a future building or increasing salaries or expanding research or something, it supposedly has to be used for the mission. What is the outrage of these orgs making this kind of profit?
Employees might suddenly feel they deserve to be paid a lot more. Suppliers will play a lot more hardball in negotiations. A middle manager may give a sinecure to their cousin.
And upper managers can extract absolutely everything trough lucrative contracts to their friends and relatives. (Of course the IRS would clamp down on obvious self-dealings, but that wouldn't make such schemes disappear. It'll make them far more complicated and expensive instead.)
Outside of the US, private hospitals tend to be overtly for-profit. Price-gauging "non-profit" hospitals are mostly an American phenomenon.
I totally agree. I don't think this is universally true of non-profits, but people are going to look for value in other ways if direct cash isn't an option.
That just sounds like a biased and overly emotive+naive response on your part.
Again, most hospitals in the world operate the same way as the US. You can go almost anywhere in SE Asia, Latín América, África, etc and see this. There's a lot more to "outside the US" than Western+Central Europe/CANZUK/Japan. The only difference is that there are strong business incentives to keep the system in place since the entire industry (in the US) is valued at more than most nations' GDP.
But feel free to keep twisting the definition or moving goalposts to somehow make the American system extra nefarious and unique.