Health care: for patients or for profits?

The author contends that the medical-industrial complex has come to dominate a substantial and growing segment of the health care "market." This complex is characterized by its ability to charge and collect for services, pass through its capital costs, and skim off profitable patients--and, at the same time, to shun its proportionate responsibility for the medically indigent, for the costs of medical education and research, and for meeting community needs. He concludes that physicians have an ethical imperative to join in a broad public coalition to protect equity and quality in medical care.