US nonprofit hospitals have long offered accommodations—private, semiprivate, and ward beds—based on the ability of patients, or their insurance companies, to pay. The health care sector is now expanding the range of comfort and convenience it offers, targeting patients who can afford these extras. By providing high-margin, high-demand services, a nonprofit hospital can keep the affluent people who consume them from shifting to private clinics and ensure that the extra amount it receives for them helps to finance its historical mission. To succeed, though, it will be necessary to abandon any lingering misperceptions that catering to affluent patients would diminish the quality of care for less affluent ones.

Private clinics, and indeed some teaching and nonprofit hospitals, have already gone beyond private rooms to offer luxury suites, catered meals, and round-the-clock private nurses. In the realm of convenience, however, small medical entrepreneurs are the trailblazers. In Seattle, the team physician for a professional sports franchise opened a practice that charged patients $20,000 a year for 24-hour access to medical services and for the same level of personalized care he had provided to a small group of athletes. His success prompted doctors elsewhere to open similar high-end operations. In Minnesota, a...