Nonprofit care surpasses for-profit

For-profit nursing homes and hospitals on average provide an inferior quality of care compared with their nonprofit peers, an extensive review of studies has found.

Authors writing in the journal Health Affairs reported that a systematic analysis of 162 studies of nonprofit versus for-profit healthcare providers supports the concept that a facility’s ownership status makes a difference in outcomes and in the cost of healthcare.

For-profit ownership is climbing in most sectors of health, from hospitals to hospice care. For example, for-profit hospitals accounted for 11% of all hospitals in the early 1990s and now account for 16%.

In what they called the biggest review of the literature to date, authors reported that eight studies found nonprofit hospitals have lower mortality rates, versus one study finding for-profits have lower rates of death.

Nonprofit hospitals are also better at keeping costs down, the review found.

For nursing homes, according to the report, the majority of studies find quality of care better at nonprofits, although for-profit nursing homes are superior at keeping costs down.