When Money Talks, the Sick Will Walk, or Crawl - Three Illustrations of the Brave New World of Health Care

In the quaint days of yesteryear, there were those health professionals who thought of what they did as a calling.  The best care of the individual patient was supposed to come first, especially ahead of maximizing one's own income.  Now in the brave new world of neoliberalism, economism, unregulated, laissez faire capitalism - call it what you want - health care has become a business, an industry.  Protests that it still should be a calling are anechoic.For example, who noticed when a very famous person wrote this in 2012?Hospitals and other facilities 'must rethink their particular role in order to avoid having health become a simple 'commodity,' subordinate to the laws of the market, and, therefore, a good reserved to a few, rather than a universal good to be guaranteed and defended,'For those who cannot tell who that was, see the end of this post.Recently, some illustrations of how health care now puts money ahead of patients came to light.Intellectual Property Rights Ahead of Sick PatientsThe first example is from the KevinMD blog, written by medical and business student Samyutka Mullangi.  My business ethics class recently discussed the case of Cipla Pharmaceuticals, an Indian generic drug manufacturer drawing the ire of big pharma by blithely ignoring international patents or employing workarounds to manufacture low-cost generics in direct violation of the patents. Cipla’s founder, Dr. Yusuf Hamied, stressed that Cipla’s goal wasn’t to st...
Source: Health Care Renewal - Category: Health Management Tags: core values economism medical ethics mission-hostile management neoliberalism perverse incentives Source Type: blogs