Health care institutions are usually different in terms of the services provided; the ownership and also the mode of funding also depend on their financial structures as they may be either governmental, non-profit or for-profit organizations. However, there are different market dealers in the financial environment who include; investors, financial managers and markets.
To compare the different financial environment, there is a for-profit hospital by the name Saint Francis, non-profit hospital called The Cleveland Clinic, and a government hospital the Tomah Veterans. Financial structure is how the organization is reflected to look and perform in the balance sheet, and also how its assets are financed. Such assets are the owner’s equity, long-term debt, short-term borrowings, and trade accounts payables (Foldvary-Schaefer, 2005).
The Cleveland Clinic is among the top four hospitals in the United States and is a non –profit institution. It was set up for different purposes; medical education, research, and also for providing different patients, who are usually from various nations of the world, with the medical care services. As it does not concentrate on making profits, the Cleveland Clinic has expanded the economy of its region, thus, creating employment opportunity to the citizens of Ohio, where it is located. The Clinic also acts as a research centre, where several companies were created, and has also generated enough funds to run a program for the Health Corps which aims at local teenagers’ obesity treatment (Lang, 1982).
The SaintFrancisHospital is a profit-making entity, which is wholly owned by an investor, and all its assets do belong to the owners. It tends to care much about the short waiting time, a serene occurrence, and equipment unlike the Cleveland Clinic. It is necessary to add that the Clinic is exempted from the tax through the charitable clause, and it shows that all non-profit health care establishments are approved for federal tax exemptions as their services and goods do allow the government to equally distribute the medical care responsibilities to both the non-profit and private sectors.
There is the Medicaid and the Medicare Health Care that are run by the government in the USA. These organizations do not use competition, but instead use other tools which are various, in order to cut the operational costs. Government health care system and the non-profit health care system approach tasks in different ways, primarily the nonprofit organizations compete with companies to bring out new and better products, therefore customers make their choices depending on the quality of products. Government system uses manipulative tools to effectively run their systems (Kirk, 2005).
Summary
It is, however, difficult to effectively manage the health care industry as compared to the other industries, since most hospitals and professionals are rarely paid by their customers, but rather the payments come through intermediaries hence, the health care ideal resources are based on the back office systems rather than on the innovative retail work flows. Also, the members who are important to the hospital are rarely paid by the hospital, which does not occur in other industries.
In most industries, products and services can be standardized in a way to improve efficiency and their quality, and this improves productivity and sales, but in health care systems every person is physically, chemically and biologically unique, therefore, it is impossible to standardize. In most industries management is able to choose their customers or whoever they want to trade with, but in the health care systems there is no room for making choices, meaning you provide your services even if the customer has no known means to make payments. Finally, in industries you can build relations and give incentives to customers, but in the health care it is not accepted.
