, Columnist
Use Profit Motive to Improve Health Care
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The fundamental problem with the U.S. health-care system, many people argue, is that medicine can’t operate well on the profit motive. It is a social good, and profit-driven behaviors undermine efforts to provide high-quality care.
It’s true that our private health-care system provides care that is extraordinarily expensive, excessive, wasteful, patient-unfriendly and often dangerously sloppy. But the problem with this argument is that for-profit and nonprofit providers alike produce the same bad result. The profit motive itself doesn’t seem to be the differentiator.