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Medical versus Fiscal Gatekeeping: Navigating Professional Contingencies at the Pharmacy Counter

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2021

Elizabeth Chiarello
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Extract

Commercialization of medicine is a growing trend that threatens to undermine physicians’ commitments to patient care in favor of personal financial interests. Bemoaned by Arnold Relman as early as 1980, growing for-profit sectors of health care have been reshaping medicine from a profession into a business, forming the foundation of what he terms a “medical-industrial complex” that threatens to undermine professional identity and reshape health care funding. Commercialization poses new ethical challenges for health care providers who have a financial stake in their health care decisions and may undermine their fiduciary duties to patients.

Certainly, commercialization has brought about new trends in medicine — one need only to look as far as the rise in for-profit hospitals, diagnostic laboratories, and proprietary nursing homes to see how opportunities for financial gain reposition physicians’ orientations vis-à-vis patients.

Type
Symposium
Information
Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics , Volume 42 , Issue 4 , Winter 2014 , pp. 518 - 534
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Law, Medicine and Ethics 2014

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