ABSTRACT
The situation in Great Britain bears some similarities, though the presence of the National Health Service limits prospects for organizing medical care for profit there. The questioning of the effectiveness of medical care led executives to ponder more closely how the health sector should be restructured and services redesigned to increase labor productivity. Labor costs comprise about 60-70 per cent of the typical hospital budget, and the bulk of the remaining $136 billion spent on hospital care in 1982 remains available to firms from the old medical industrial complex. The health maintenance organization strategy tended to legitimize profit-making through corporate entities in the delivery of health services. The probable convergence between the corporate class interest for cost containment and the for-profit reorganization lies in the legitimation of a chaotic system of health care consistent with its principles of economic production; yet antagonisms will inevitably persist.
