How to Manage the Intrusion of Business into Health
There is an unspoken tension that runs through modern healthcare — a tension between two worlds with very different ethical foundations.
On one side stands medicine, an age-old profession rooted in sacrifice, service, and the moral imperative to place another’s wellbeing above one’s own. On the other stands business, driven by the pursuit of financial gain, efficiency, and growth. Both are essential for the functioning of a modern health system, yet their values often collide.
A Clash of Ethics
The ethics of medicine have always centred on altruism: the quiet act of putting others first. Physicians and healthcare workers are trained — and in many cases, called — to place human welfare above all else. In contrast, the business world is built on self-interest and return on investment. Its guiding principle is not harm reduction, but profit generation.
Neither worldview is inherently wrong. The problem arises when business believes its ethics should dominate healthcare — when commercial imperatives begin to dictate clinical priorities. When this happens, the outcomes are predictably poor: practitioners lose autonomy, patients lose trust, and the population loses access to care that prioritises wellbeing over profit.
Why Alignment, Not Opposition, Is the Answer
For health systems to function sustainably, business and healthcare must align — not compete. Hospitals, clinics, telehealth companies, and research ventures all require funding, structure, and operational efficiency. But the ethical hierarchy must remain clear: business exists to facilitate healthcare, not to define it.
When business leaders recognise that the clinician’s moral framework is not a liability but an asset — one that keeps the enterprise credible, humane, and trusted — true partnership becomes possible.
Clinicians in Industry: A Missed Opportunity
In my own country, Australia, it remains relatively uncommon for clinicians to work within private industry. This is, I believe, a missed opportunity. Doctors and nurses bring not only clinical expertise but also a lived understanding of ethics, empathy, and the real consequences of decisions on human lives.
In countries like the United States, where the healthcare-business interface is far more established, the problem is not absence but excess — a blurring of boundaries so complete that profit and patient welfare often become indistinguishable. Neither extreme serves society well.
Finding the Middle Ground
The conversation we need is not about eliminating business from healthcare, but about managing its influence responsibly. Clinicians and business leaders must sit at the same table, each understanding their role.
Clinicians should lead in defining ethical standards, patient safety, and quality of care.
Businesses should focus on providing infrastructure, innovation, and sustainable financial models that allow those standards to flourish.
The best case scenario isn’t hard to imagine: one where patients receive the best possible care, delivered by practitioners empowered to do their jobs ethically and effectively — supported, not directed, by business. Not too hard?