Opinion: Amid hospital closures and soaring costs, medical centers should offer affordable care, not luxuries

Some hospitals look more like 5-star hotels.
(Photo by Jared Rice, Unsplash)

An anticipated "getaway" or "a journey of a lifetime" is often tied to a vacation that offers time away from the stress of daily life. But these traveling words are now being used to rebrand disease treatments. "Spin doctors are marketing getting sick as an adventure," writes Elisabeth Rosenthal in her opinion for KFF Health News. "It's not."

Rosenthal has always enjoyed travel and, for a time, lived in Rome. Her more recent "trips" were nothing like a vacation or living abroad. "I'm told, I've been on a journey. Two journeys, actually: First, a 'traumatic brain injury journey,' experienced at Johns Hopkins Hospital after I banged my head and developed trouble with my balance and gait," she writes. "More recently, I've been a traveling companion on my husband's 'cancer journey' at Memorial Sloan Kettering in New York City."

While her care was excellent, the profoundly severe element of many illnesses "has been rebranded in American health care as a kind of adventure," Rosenthal adds. "Experts speak of stroke journeys. Hospital systems invite people on kidney transplant journeys. The language has trickled down into advertising: Take a hair loss journey or a weight loss journey (newly popular because of Wegovy and similar drugs). The heart failure journey even comes with a map."

"A map?" Rosenthal asks. You don't visit anywhere exotic during disease treatment, and none of the treatments are glamorous. She writes. "In recent years, tight budgets, staffing shortages, and burnout have hit American hospitals. At the same time, many health centers in the U.S. — including the most prestigious ones, and even some community hospitals — have morphed into seven-star hotels. New hospital buildings, such as recent projects at the University of Michigan hospital system . . . . A hospital might now boast about its views, high-thread-count sheets, or food provided by a Michelin-starred chef."

In a nation where rural hospitals face towering debts and closures, and many Americans opt to delay treatment because of cost, "Is it worth it?" Rosenthal wonders. "Room charges in many hospitals can exceed $1,000 a night. . . . A hospital's function is to diagnose and to heal at a price that sick people can afford. I dream of a no-frills Target- or Ikea-like hospital for care. . . . The best hospitals in Europe are utilitarian structures resembling urban high schools."

Rosenthal suggests: "Instead of providing free coffee and a piano in a soaring, art-filled marble lobby, how about focusing on the very basic things that health systems in the U.S. should do, but — in my experience — in many cases do not, like making it easier for patients to schedule appointments? Shortening the now lengthy wait times to see physicians who take insurance plans? Or paying for adequate staffing on nights and weekends? Or ending those two-day stays in emergency rooms when all inpatient beds are full?"