Tuesday, July 21, 2015

$300 million misplaced in NYC

If you were going to invest $300 million in the health care of New York City residents, how would you spend it?  In an era of "population health," would you spend it on a single 115,000-square-foot project to provide proton beam therapy?

Well, that's what Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, Montefiore Medical Center, Mount Sinai Hospital and ProHEALTH, a multi-specialty physician group practice, are doing.

Construction of the VOA Associates-designed complex will begin this summer with the first patient expected to receive treatment in the spring of 2018. Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase & Co. provided financing.

The beat goes on. How many more of these do we "need?"

2 comments:

Barry Carol said...

Why does Medicare keep paying for proton beam treatments based on cost rather than value relative to alternative treatment options? If providers think they can make money from proton beam equipment, they will keep investing in it. Won't they?

Unknown said...

Karl Marx said it best in describing one of the factors of Capitalism: Supply drives demand. Produce a million SUVs even if there are only 100,000 people who want them. Jeez, can't just stop and start the factories based on demand.

Hospitals sure love those multi-million dollar diagnostic/treatment machines. Hey, now how are we gonna pay for this baby? Prescribe the machine, even if the patient doesn't need it.