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A triumvirate of corporate interests now controls the American healthcare system: the corporations which manage health care “delivery” in our hospitals and clinics, the insurance companies who decide which medical visits or procedures they will cover for which patients, and the pharmaceutical industry, which manipulates the cost of our medications to maximize their profits. These corporations now spend increasing amounts on public relations, marketing and executive salaries, and considerably less on human interaction with patients and their physicians. Their communication systems have been computerized and made more “efficient”—meaning that it is often impossible to speak with a human being who will attempt to answer questions in a non-scripted manner and to solve problems with billing or with approvals for care. These new practices have been adopted as part of a “lean” corporate business model that favors marketing, “efficiency” and the bottom line over all else, including actual patient care.
It is of great interest that the corporate management models adopted currently by America's healthcare corporations and corporate chains closely resemble the business model adopted by the Boeing corporation as it developed its fateful Boeing 737-Max aircraft. After two terrifying crashes of this airplane shortly following its release, considerable national and international media attention was paid to the cause of its failure. Careful analysis of the crashes revealed that they were caused by shocking deficiencies in both the aircraft design and in pilot training methods. Further probing revealed that these errors were the result of a newly transformed and fatefully “broken” corporate culture at Boeing (Robison, 2021).
It had been a long-standing tradition at Boeing prior to the development of the 737-Max to consult closely with aircraft engineers, test pilots and pilot-trainers about their evaluation of developing aircraft models so that any problems which they noted could be q