All this becomes clear in the instance of a simple procedure such as a chest X ray. A private radiologist in his office will perform this for you at one half or one third of what the hospital charges. His charge largely reflects the fact that his unit can operate on an eight-hour day and a forty-hour week; other costs, such as equipment and supplies, are the same. In medicine today-as in every other industry-people are more expensive than anything else. Sixty-three per cent of the hospital budget now goes to the salaries and benefits of employees. And much of the rise in hospital costs is directly attributable to the demand of these employees that they not be personally forced to subsidize the health business by accepting wages incommensurate with similar jobs in other industries. Their demands are justified; most employees are still underpaid. Their salaries will increase in the future.

One cannot, however, fairly claim that hospitals are superbly efficient. Especially in a teaching hospital, attention to cost in the medical, non-hotel sector is less central than one would like it to be. One can argue about whether too many tests are ordered, and the argument can continue endlessly. But certainly, when physicians who order these tests don't know what patients are charged for them, eyebrows must go up. In general, doctors tend to operate on a "spare no expense" philosophy which will, eventually, need to be tempered.

But, more fundamentally, the present cost structure of the hospital seems to lead to a rather old-fashioned conclusion: no one should go there unless he absolutely has to.

If a diagnostic procedure can be done on an ambulatory, out-patient basis, it should be; if a series of tests and X rays can be done outside the hospital, they should be. No one should be admitted unless his care absolutely depends upon being inside the hospital; no one should be admitted unless he requires the hour-to-hour facilities of the house staff, the nursing staff, and the laboratories.

For decades, admission to the hospital was necessary because there was no other facility available. For a large segment of the population, care was either given in the hospital, or not at all; and the hospital's clinic system was a poor compromise, with hordes of patients being brought in to wait hours-sometimes literally days-to have relatively brief tests performed.

There is hope that the satellite clinics will help solve the problem; one study of a satellite clinic in Boston reported that there were fewer hospital admissions as a result of the clinic's work.

In any case, alternative facilities must be found, because it is unlikely that hospital costs will ever go down. The best anyone can hope to do in the foreseeable future is to stabilize them somewhere in the neighborhood of $100.00 a day. This makes the hospital an expensive place-but it has its uses, and indeed will be an economically tolerable place, if it is used appropriately.