For-profit hospitals – in Europe?

Yeah.  I don’t know all that much but Deutsche Welle had an article about a doctor who refused to perform abortions, and sparked debate because,as chief physician for a hospital, decided that no abortions would be performed in that hospital – something that usually occurs in the context of church-run hospitals, not secular hospitals.  And I’ll leave the whole abortion angle for later, because it requires a lot more context on the situation in Germany, and instead point to a statement in that article:  “The hospital in question is run by the Capio group, one of the major providers of healthcare across Europe.”

The Capio Group?  Who are they?  They’re a for-profit chain of hospitals and clinics in Sweden, Norway, France, and Germany.  My first thought was that they are that sort of clinic that only accepts privately-insured patients (because there is an opt-out provision in Germany, and supplementary insurance in the remaining countries) but the DW article talked about this doctor’s no-abortion decision having ramifications because it is “the only hospital in the region with a gynecological department,” which would seem to say that it couldn’t be restricted to only private-pay patients, and likewise, in their annual report, they talked about being impacted by the French doctors’ strike and a reduction in government reimbursement rates, both of which wouldn’t make sense in terms of providers for private-pay/supplementarily-insured patients.   They also specifically mention that in Norway, they benefit from a government practice of subcontracting to private hospitals.  And their business model seems to be largely a matter of aiming, through superior business processes and patient care, to make money even with government-dictated reimbursement rates.

Oh, and they used to own a chain of hospitals in the UK, but in 2007, they sold them to an Australian private hospital company, or, more specifically, the Ramsay Health Care, “Australia’s largest private hospital operator and a well-recognised brand in the industry.”  And this company also has a business unit running 9 hospitals in France.

So I don’t really know much, but I find it fascinating that there’s a 4-country mega-chain of hospitals in Europe.  I would have assumed that hospitals were generally as local and government (city)-owned as the hospital my youngest was born in.  Does Capio purchase existing hospitals, or construct new ones?  How many such chains are there?  Anyway, we worry about hospital consolidation the U.S., but this seems to be happening on a regional level and not this much wider level — and at the same time, the regional consolidations are presumably much more anti-competitive than pan-European hospital systems, to the extent that any given town still has other options.

So, I’d love to know more, but that’s all I have for you for tonight.

Image:  https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3ACapio_Aschaffenburg_Street_view.jpg; By Dtollk (Own work) [CC BY-SA 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], via Wikimedia Commons