Medicine: Megalopolis’ Hospitals

In some 1,500 square miles which includes New York City and adjacent sections of New York, New Jersey, Connecticut live 11,000,000 souls bound together by economic and social ties. Among their many superlatives, the inhabitants of this megalopolis support the greatest medical community on earth—814 hospitals and other agencies for care of the sick, which can hospitalize 70,976 bed-ridden patients at one time.

The United Hospital Fund of New York fortnight ago published the first thorough analysis of the financing of those institutions. To run them cost $109,244,000 in the year studied (1934). They received $107,031,000 (44.5% from taxes, 40.6% from patients, 9.3% from contributions, 5.6% from endowment and invested funds). There remained a net deficit of about $2,200,000. Part of that deficit was paid by the United Hospital Fund. Part of it just piled up like an Ally’s War debt. And it would have been millions greater if the institutions had been run on a business basis, taking into account depreciation ($11,835,000), tax exemptions and free water ($10,560,000), interest charges on the investment ($11,499,000).

By 1960, United Hospital Fund actuaries figure, the New York megalopolis will contain 17,535,000 people, will require 116,800 hospital beds. New establishments and replacements should cost $607,216,300. As in the rest of the U. S., the population is getting older on the average, and crazier. So the New York area must have more accommodations for its mentally and chronically ill. On the other hand, many people, including pregnant women, go to hospitals when they could be treated just as well at home. Needed, therefore, will be more visiting nurses making rounds of tenements, apartments, private homes, if New York City and its environs are to save on future hospital building.

To get all this effectively started, analysts headed by onetime Under-Secretary of the Treasury Arthur Atwood Ballantine recommended that trustees of at least New York City hospitals form a hospital council and cooperate instead of working at cross-purposes as they often do. And such a hospital council, the most conciliating, effective hospitaler of the megalopolis, President David Hunter McAlpin Pyle of the United Hospital Fund, last week was all ready to organize.