It is because doctors are understood to place patients’ interests above commercial ones that they have long enjoyed professional autonomy and public trust. The history of medicine is too littered with incompetence and immorality to believe that doctors have always been worthy of this status. Still, something profound is lost when we submit to the jaundiced view that medicine is a business like any other. There is value in striving for something higher.
From Dhruv Khullar’s “The Gilded Age of Medicine Is Here” in the New Yorker.