Scientific excellence, professional virtue, and the profit motive: The market and health care reform

Mounting shadows darken our calling and threaten to transform healing from a covenant into a business contract. Canons of commerce are displacing dictates of healing, trampling our profession's most sacred values. Market medicine treats patients as profit centers. The time we are allowed to spend with the sick shrinks under the pressure to increase throughout, as though we were dealing with industrial commodities rather than afflicted human beings in need of compassion and caring