General Electric and the New York-Presbyterian Hospital.

• Author: Donohoe, Martin
• Position: Biodevastation - Report

Health care has become increasingly corporatized in the United States, a phenomenon which has contributed to decreased access to care for the 45 million uninsured (and the millions more who are underinsured). Academic medical centers, where much of the nation's health-related research is conducted and where new physicians and nurses are trained, have increasingly entered into corporate partnerships. These joint ventures promote secrecy in research (in order to turn out more patentable, i.e., profitable, medications and medical devices) and sometimes link educational institutions with companies possessing poor environmental and labor-relations records, and whose corporate practices have often harmed, rather than benefited, the public's health.

Such is the case with the recent partnership between New York-Presbyterian Hospital (the organization that resulted from the merger of the hospitals of Cornell and Columbia Universities, and one of the largest academic medical conglomerates in the country) and General Electric (GE) Medical Systems, a medical products and services business with revenues of approximately $9 billion. [1]

New York-Presbyterian, one of the dominant health care providers and educators in the state (indeed the nation), will spend a reported $500 million over 10 years on products and services from GE Medical Systems. [1] In exchange for purported discounts on medical supplies and the promise of enhanced technological standardization and simplification, New York-Presbyterian will no longer buy from competing vendors. [1] Aside from the possibility of GE's financial incentives to not necessarily give disinterested advice regarding technology purchases, there are now increased incentives for the hospital to promote the use of expensive high-technology (read "highly reimbursable") care, which may not necessarily be indicated, for its paying patients, while at the same time cutting basic services to those unable to afford them. [1] Ironically, this occurs in the setting of academic medical centers increasingly recruiting wealthy foreigners and opening luxury primary care practices, ventures fraught with scientific and ethical problems. [2,3]

The General Electric Empire

GE Medical Systems is a subsidiary of General Electric (GE), the world's largest company by market share. [4] In 2003, GE had revenues of $134.2 billion, greater than the GDP of more than 2/3 of the member states of the United Nations. [4,5] In 2003, it's net after-tax profits were $15.6 billion. [4,5]

GE is best...