Is the Profit Motive Ruining American Healthcare?
We all know that healthcare costs in the U.S. are too high. But why is American healthcare so expensive? Some experts blame the desire for profit. Russell Andrews, a neurosurgeon and author of Too Big To Succeed laments “the morphing of American medicine from a function of a humanitarian society into a revenue stream for healthcare profits, drug and medical device companies, hospitals, and insurance companies. In essence, we have transformed healthcare in the U.S. into an industry whose goal is to profitable.” Andrews goes on to characterize the profit motive as “a virus” infecting the system.
Sachin Shah, a physician affiliated with Doctors For America, contrasts the struggles patients have paying for their medical bills to the enormous profits of American insurance companies:
“The five largest health insurance companies – WellPoint, United Health, Aetna, Humana, and Cigna – … earned over $3.3 billion in profits [between April and June 2011].” Shah goes on to contend that “Profit in the health insurance industry is the single greatest barrier to building an efficient, sustainable system of healthcare in this country.”
David Goldhill is not convinced that profits are the problem. Author of Catastrophic Care: How American Healthcare Killed My Father and How We Can Fix It, Goldhill points out how small those profits are in the face of overall healthcare spending… (Read more and view comments at Forbes)
