Profits Before Patients

Introduction: The Cost of CommodificationThe United States spends nearly twice as much per capita on healthcare as any other developed nation, yet consistently ranks near the bottom on critical health outcomes, from life expectancy to chronic disease burden.Americans pay more for hospital visits, physician services, and prescription drugs-not because care is more effective, but because the system is engineered to charge more.This contradiction is not incidental; it is systemic.The Iron Triangle of healthcare-cost, quality, and access-illustrates that optimizing one pillar often requires trade-offs with the others.Yet the U.S. manages to compromise all three.In pursuit of profit, it delivers a system that is simultaneously unaffordable, inaccessible, and often underperforming.Unlike nations with universal or public healthcare systems designed to promote population health, the American model is fragmented, opaque, and driven by market logic.Insurance companies, pharmaceutical corporations, hospital networks, and medical device manufacturers all operate within a framework that rewards revenue generation over patient outcomes.This paper argues that the root cause of the nation's healthcare crisis is not inefficiency or lack of innovation-but a profit-centered architecture that treats health as a commodity.In such a system, administrative complexity is rewarded, pricing is unregulated, and the human need for care becomes subordinate to quarterly earnings.To build a just and sustainable healthcare future, we must confront a hard truth: profit and patient care do not-and cannot-share equal priority. Administrative Waste Reflects a Market, Not a MissionA staggering 25% to 31% of U.S. healthcare expenditures are absorbed not by patient care, but by administrative overhead-a rate nearly triple that of nations with single-payer or universal healthcare systems (Himmelstein and Woolhandler).This bloat is not accidental.It is a byproduct of a healthcare economy that values reimbursement more than recovery.Unlike streamlined models in Canada or Taiwan, where billing systems are unified and claims processing is centralized, the American system fractures its administrative labor across thousands of private insurers, each wielding its own rules, coding systems, and paperwork demands.

Récupéré en direct depuis OpenAlex et désinversé. Les résumés ne sont pas conservés dans cette base de données : les index inversés représentent 8,6 Go des 9,3 Go de texte de la base, et le serveur dispose de 13 Go libres.