How does capitalism and for-profit medicine infect the intentions of doctors and physicians? How is this related to things like capitalist alienation? I’d love to read y’all’s thoughts about this. I’ll go first 😅:
Especially in the USA, due to their much higher wages and command over nurses, doctors are practically petty bourgeois, not regular workers. As such, American doctors are quite disconnected from the hardships of regular workers, usually own sizable portfolios of rental properties and other rentier enterprises, and have political views more similar to a Wall-Street trust-fund baby.
Just so you know I’m not bullshitting, several people in my family are medical doctors (MDs). I’m intimately familiar with the goings-on’s in the US medical industry, and the general views of those in medicine. While they do care about their patients, they don’t really seem to care about whether their wages and moneymaking enterprises indirectly harm patients, nor do they seem to have much control over the consequences either.
This rot even extends to MD associations. If you didn’t know, the American Medical Association, which lobbies for physicians and doctors, deliberately lobbied from 1980-2000s to reduce the number of physicians trained in order to “prevent a physician surplus” and increase physician wages (possibly to stop doctors from suffering the same wage decreases other US workers faced under neoliberalism). They were a bit overzealous and singlehandedly caused the physician shortage in the USA today.[1]
Purdue Pharma didn’t sell opioids directly to people, it paid doctors to sell it to patients. Some doctors even went along with it despite seeing the consequences their patients suffered. The kickbacks were just too good to pass up.[2] One of the MDs I know personally is a pain management physician and works with pain medicine daily. They know other doctors who have gotten fired for their Purdue kickbacks, and even one that got themselves addicted to Purdue opioids (IDK what that idiot was thinking).
The doctors I know do find health insurance to be super annoying, though their large wages make them OK with the situation (Doctors in the USA are paid much more than doctors in single-payer systems, like a bribe to accept the shittiness of the system. For example, many Canadian doctors move to the USA to increase their wages by 2X). They have to employ a dedicated nurse for insurance paperwork just to wrangle money out of insurance companies.
All in all, I can’t say that US doctors are shitty humans, especially since I know them. They mostly seem to have resigned themselves to accept the capitalist system for what it is, and to just try to maximize personal benefits from it. If their patients feel better along the way, that’s nice too.