Page 2
Duke Hospital, InterCom
Supt^^
Coxnex
Spring is here and it is wonderful.
However, it l;)rings with it that ex
quisitely painful exercise known as
“budgeting.” Many of us, in private,
use several terms which are much less
socially acceptable. However, there
is no escaping the need for annual
summing-up of past experience and
projection of future activity in our
continuing attempt to find ways to
do the best possible job in care of
patients, teaching of health personnel
and research in the health field. Un
fortunately, it is necessary that we
do this within the bounds of the abili
ties of our University, our patients,
our students and other sponsors to
pay.
Continuing advances in the cost of
goods and services common to all of
the economy, rapid and continuing
additions to the techniques of medical
care and the education of our people
to more effective use of such services
make the job of budgeting an increas
ingly complex one. For more than
fifty years the cost of hospital services
has advanced steadily at an annual
rate of from five to eight percent.
There is nothing to indicate that this
will not continue indefinitely. In terms
of our own hospital budget this means
three to five hundred thousand dollars
advance in cost per year.
While personal income has ad
vanced in a generally similar way, we
have acquired many new uses for our
money in the purchase of more com
fortable living for which we had much
rather spend our money than for
hospital bills. Therefore, we tend to
resent the cost of illness as infring
ing upon our choice of ways to use
our money. In other words, when
illness comes, we are forced to spend
money we have planned to use some
other way. Although we have tried
to lessen this risk throiigh insurance,
the basic attitude remains the same.
We also tend to think that the highest
available medical skill and hospital
Plenty of Food - Plenty of Fun !
Staff - July Employees-July /2
equipment should be ours as a right,
when we do not necessarily apply the
same reasoning to our ability to
choose between a second hand Ford
and a Custom Rolls Royce.
However, we tend to overemphasize
the residual importance of these prob
lems in cost, distribution and
attitudes and to overlook what we are
getting for our money. Certainly, we
wouldn’t buy 1920’s Ford at 1920’s
price in comparison with the current
Ford at its current price and we
couldn’t buy the 1920 Ford for the
1920 price even if it were being made
and we wanted to buy it. In 1920 we
couldn’t have bought a television set
or an electric stove or most of our
common conveniences of today at all.
There were no penicillin, no sulfa
drugs, no blood transfusions, no x-
rays, few helpful laboratory pro
cedures.
According to figures from the
Health Information Foundation the
average person will live twenty four
years longer than he would have in
1900, a child under 18 today is an
orphan less than % as often as in
1900, 42 of every 100 white babies
born in 1900 would live to retire at
65, for every such baby born today
71 will live to retire at 65.
Your chances of dying from pneu-
monia-infiuenza today are 86% less
than in 1900, from tuberculosis 94%,
from gastroenteritis 96% and diph
theria 99%.. Life-saving surgery is
a daily commonplace in procedures
which were either unknown or im
possible in 1900.
We can only conclude that our
labors are not in vain nor our prob
lems insoluble when the end-product
continues to buy so much in invalu
able human life.