ABSTRACT
A primary problem for a hospital is how to attract a medical staff because, by law, only doctors may prescribe much of the treatment for patients that hospitals provide and only doctors can provide some of that treatment. In the US health care system, doctors typically function as independent economic entities. Depending on how hospital care is paid for, it is easy to see how competition for doctors can become quite costly. Particularly in an environment in which health insurance pays for most of the costs of most hospitalizations, it may well be that competition among hospitals mostly manifests itself in a technology-intensive war to attract physicians. A hospital must also attract patients because they bring with them the revenue the hospital needs to pay its costs. Some of the same things that attract doctors to a hospital also attract patients, but sometimes different things matter, and sometimes the problem of attracting patients’ conflicts with the problem of attracting doctors.
