Healthcare Turns Business: Greed Over Care
For centuries, doctors stood as symbols of compassion, trust, and healing. Patients believed that a doctor would always put life before money. This belief built an unshakable bond between society and the medical profession. But in today’s world, healthcare feels more like a corporate service than a noble calling. Hospitals set financial targets. Doctors receive pressure to meet revenue goals. Pharmaceuticals chase profits before patient safety. Costs continue to rise, while negligence, fraud, and scandals make headlines every other week.
This is not just perception. Real data and real cases show how medicine has tilted towards money-making. Families lose life savings, patients lose lives due to negligence, and scams run inside hospitals that were supposed to be temples of care.
This article explores how healthcare has turned into business, with global and Indian examples, recent news, shocking cases of fraud, and the human cost.
Why Healthcare Becomes a Business
High Cost of Technology and Infrastructure
Modern medicine depends on costly machines. MRI scanners, robotic surgical systems, advanced imaging, and genetic labs cost crores of rupees. Hospitals borrow money or depend on investors to buy them. The only way to recover this cost is by using these machines as much as possible. This creates a push for doctors to recommend more tests and surgeries than necessary. Instead of asking whether the test benefits the patient, the hospital focuses on whether the test helps the balance sheet.
Insurance and Payment Systems
In countries with insurance, payments do not come directly from patients but from insurance companies. Hospitals and doctors try to increase claims through complicated billing. Every additional test, every extra pill, every longer stay means more money. Fee-for-service models reward quantity, not quality. If a patient undergoes five procedures instead of two, the hospital earns more, regardless of outcome.
Corporate Hospitals and Business Chains
Hospitals now function like corporations. Boards of directors focus on profit margins, market expansion, and shareholder returns. Doctors become employees who must meet monthly financial targets. Some receive performance-linked bonuses not for saving lives, but for generating income. Hospital packages for surgeries or health checkups include unnecessary add-ons. Care becomes secondary, revenue primary.
Pharma and Medical Device Industry
Pharmaceutical giants and device makers run billion-dollar industries. They sponsor medical conferences, influence guidelines, and lobby doctors. Doctors may get incentives for prescribing certain brands or using certain implants. Instead of what is best for the patient, decisions may depend on which drug or device offers the highest reward.
Sale of Health Data
In the age of digital health, even patient data has become a product. Hospitals and startups collect and sell anonymized data for research and AI training. Globally, healthcare data monetization is growing fast. From USD 480 million in 2024, it is expected to rise to USD 1,923.5 million by 2034, growing nearly 15 percent every year. In Asia and the Middle East, this market is already worth about 2 billion euros annually. Individual patient datasets hold commercial value. This creates another stream of income for healthcare providers.
Weak Regulation and Oversight
Many countries lack strong oversight. Complaints take years to resolve. Very few doctors lose their license even after negligence. Medical councils often consist of members from the same profession, which creates conflicts of interest. This weak accountability allows unethical practices to flourish.
Recent Data and Market Trends
- Deloitte’s 2025 Global Health Care Executive Outlook shows that over 70 percent of executives in five countries focus on operational efficiency and productivity, not patient care.
- McKinsey reports that in the United States, healthcare economics shift towards non-acute services, software, analytics, and specialty pharmacy, all high-revenue areas.
- The big data in healthcare industry will jump from USD 78 billion in 2025 to USD 540 billion by 2035, growing by 19.2 percent every year.
These numbers prove that healthcare is not only about healing anymore. It is about markets, investments, and profits.
Fraud and Negligence Cases: Shocking Examples
Fertility Clinic Scam in Hyderabad and Andhra Pradesh
In 2025, the Enforcement Directorate raided nine locations linked to Universal Srushti Fertility Centre. The clinic faced allegations of fraudulent IVF and surrogacy operations, DNA mismatches, and even infant trafficking. Couples lost lakhs of rupees, some between 11 to 44 lakh. Government doctors were suspended for involvement.
“Goody Bag” Prescription Fraud in the United States
Indian-origin doctor Neil K. Anand was sentenced to 14 years in prison. He prescribed unnecessary sedatives and medicines, packed them in “goody bags,” and billed insurance companies. He defrauded insurers of over $4 million.
Cataract Surgery Disaster in Bareilly
A 61-year-old farmer underwent cataract surgery in Bareilly. The day after surgery, he lost vision in one eye. A medical panel found swelling that could have been treated earlier. The doctor refused to provide remedial treatment despite official orders. The farmer lost his eye permanently.
Disability Card Scam for MBBS Seats in Karnataka
Two doctors issued fake disability cards to help students secure MBBS seats under the disability quota. Each card was sold for ₹5,000. At least 21 fraudulent cards surfaced during admission verification.
Jaipur Government Health Scheme Fraud
In Jaipur, one cardholder under the RGHS health scheme availed treatment worth ₹26 lakh using fake OPD slips. Doctors and pharmacies helped in the scam. Multiple officials faced suspension and FIRs.
Fake Doctor in Bengal
A man posed as a doctor using his wife’s degree. He treated patients, and one patient died because of wrong treatment. Police arrested him, but it exposed how easy it is for unqualified people to play with human lives.
Jayant Patel in Australia
Indian-origin surgeon Jayant Patel, known as “Dr. Death,” worked in Bundaberg Hospital in Australia. Between 2003 and 2005, nearly 87 patients under his care died. Nurses tried to hide patients from him. Investigations found negligence, false records, and misconduct.
Types of Abuse in the System
Overdiagnosis and Overtreatment
Doctors recommend more scans, tests, or surgeries than needed. Many private hospitals sell health check-up packages filled with unnecessary tests for healthy people. Every extra procedure means extra billing.
Commissions and Kickbacks
Doctors sometimes receive cuts from diagnostic centers, labs, or pharma companies. Hospitals promote certain drugs or brands because of financial tie-ups. Patients pay higher bills while unaware of the behind-the-scenes deals.
Negligence and Shortcuts
Doctors under pressure rush consultations and skip important checks. Mistakes happen, and patients suffer. The Bareilly cataract case shows how negligence can ruin lives.
Profiting From the Dead
There are cases where hospitals delay declaring a death so that ICU charges continue. Some bill families for procedures even after patients have passed away.
Fraud and Fake Treatments
Fake doctors, bogus fertility clinics, counterfeit drugs — these scams continue to surface. In fertility scams, couples desperate for children pay lakhs, only to face heartbreak and fraud.
Human Cost of Commercialization
Loss of Trust
Patients no longer trust every recommendation. Families wonder whether the surgery is needed or whether it is a money-making tactic. This doubt breaks the sacred doctor-patient relationship.
Financial Ruin
Healthcare pushes families into debt. One serious illness drains savings and often forces loans or asset sales.
Burnout Among Doctors
Many doctors join medicine to heal. But hospitals pressure them with targets. They face moral conflict and burnout. Some give in, some leave, and some compromise on ethics.
Inequality
Rich patients can afford premium care. Poor patients depend on underfunded public hospitals. This widens the gap between classes and leaves millions vulnerable.
Why Reforms Are Difficult
- Powerful hospital chains and pharma companies protect their interests.
- Medical councils are slow and biased in disciplinary action.
- Patients lack technical knowledge to question bills or treatments.
- Doctors themselves resist reforms that threaten income.
Steps Toward Change
- Strong, independent medical regulators with power to suspend licenses.
- Transparent billing with itemized details.
- Mandatory second opinions for high-cost procedures.
- Value-based payment models that reward outcomes, not procedures.
- Strict action against fraud, scams, and negligence.
- Strengthening of public hospitals so that poor patients are not forced into private debt traps.
- Ethical training for doctors with strict enforcement of standards.
Conclusion: Can Medicine Find Its Soul Again?
Healthcare needs money to function, but when money becomes the primary aim, patients suffer. Recent scandals in India and abroad show that the line between service and business has blurred dangerously. Technology, insurance, pharma, and hospital chains keep pushing medicine deeper into the profit game.
The way forward is not to reject modern medicine but to reform it. Transparency, accountability, strong public healthcare, and ethical medical education can bring back balance. Doctors must heal first, earn later. Hospitals must care first, profit later. Until then, patients will continue to see hospitals as businesses and doctors as businessmen, rather than saviors.
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