This smacks of the sort of corporatism that would let Railtrack get away with its padded profits and its inefficientoperations in return for propping up Mr Prescott's fading reputation.
Donald Berwick, a Harvard Medical School professor and chief executive of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, says as much as 40% of U.S. medical spending is squandered on inefficientoperations and unnecessary overhead.
This is hugely inefficient, because pricey late interventions and operations could very often have been avoided with a much smaller investment in preventive care.
Oddly--or sadly--enough, overcrowding in hospitals is actually the result not of sudden infectious outbreaks, but of the inefficient way surgeons book their operating rooms, says Eugene Litvak, a Boston University operations management expert.