The Health Care Industry: Where Is It Taking Us?

ELEVEN years ago, in Annual Discourse presented before Massachusetts Medical Society and later published in Journal,1 I first addressed issue of commercialism in medical care. Referring to what I called the new medical—industrial complex, I described a huge new industry that was supplying health care services for profit. It included proprietary hospitals and nursing homes, diagnostic laboratories, home care and emergency room services, renal hemodialysis units, and a wide variety of other medical services that had formerly been provided largely by public or private not-for-profit community-based institutions or by private physicians in their offices. The . . .