Does Making a Profit Hurt Medicine?

So, now that the fucked-up kid who shot United Healthcare’s CEO has gotten thousands of dollars from people who want to defend his ‘right’ to kill someone representing the medical industry that puts profits over people, we are starting to get all the usual nonsense about how America endures the practice of medicine which creates worse health outcomes than what we suffer from any disease.

And what we are treated to are articles and stories by physicians who because they have the letters MD following their names, it’s assumed that this makes them somehow more qualified than anyone else to tell us about everything that’s bad about the deplorable state of medicine in the United States.

Yesterday I received the daily missive from The New Yorker Magazine, with the lead story written by a physician who happens to be on the staff of the Cornell Medical Center in New York and explains how and why American medicine has entered what he refers to as a ‘gilded age;’ a term coined back in the nineteenth century when industrialization created a class of billionaires like Andrew Carnegie, J. P. Morgan and John D. Rockefeller who couldn’t even compute the total value of everything they owned.

According to Dhruv Khullar, the author of this piece, health care has become a feasting ground for private equity firms, who are realizing enormous profits…