The "Business" of Healing

I had my attention called to this article from the New Yorker by one of the chaplains at Yale-New Haven Hospital. I thought it was interesting because it offers an analysis of the health care crisis that isn't the usual private vs. public plan debate. The overall point the author is trying to make is that America's health care problems are due in large part to the fact that health care in this country is profit driven rather than patient centered.

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/06/01/090601fa_fact_gawande

Having spent all of last summer interviewing doctors about what they thought was wrong with health care in America, I have to say that I think this article is spot on. Almost every doctor I spoke with bemoaned the fact that health care has become a business-- controlled not by doctors but by HMO's, insurance companies, and drug companies. Of course this isn't true everywhere, as is evidenced by some of the examples cited in the article. But if the national debate doesn't start to address the problem of profit-driven health care, in the end, it won't matter who ends up footing the bill for health care reform-- it will become unsustainable.