In September 2026, the Supreme Court of India did not mince words. Observing the exorbitant pricing and profit margins on essential medicines—where patients were being charged up to nine times the normal rate for life-saving cancer drugs—the court described the practice as “rampage, carnage, and broad daylight dacoity.”
But this judicial outrage merely scratches the surface of a much deeper, global crisis. Across the world, the increasing profit orientation of healthcare systems, driven by massive corporate interests, is violating the essential rights of patients. While these distortions are well-documented in developed nations, the human cost is exponentially higher in countries like India, where patients lack the economic base and social security to absorb such financial shocks.
To understand the human toll of this commercialized machine, one need only look at the doctors operating within it. In his book Doctored: The Disillusionment of an American Physician, Dr. Sandeep Jauhar—a former director of a leading US heart failure program—exposes a system where even the most well-intentioned physicians feel trapped.
Jauhar paints a picture of a highly commercialized environment that breeds profound moral injury. In a survey of 12,000 physicians, a mere 6 percent described their morale as positive. Overburdened by paperwork and pressured by hospital administrators, doctors are stripped of their time with patients. The psychological toll is devastating: among all professions in the US, physicians have the highest suicide rate.
“I feel like a pawn in a money-making game,” one doctor confessed on an online medical forum, lamenting the pressure to order unnecessary CT scans. Another noted, “We allowed the insurance companies to come between us and our patients.”
This profit motive manifests in staggering systemic waste. A Congressional investigation once found that surgeons performed 2.4 million unnecessary operations, resulting in nearly 12,000 deaths. The Institute of Medicine estimated that wasteful healthcare spending costs the US $750 billion annually. Furthermore, researchers found that doctors who own their own nuclear scanners are seven times more likely to order them, contributing to a sevenfold increase in American radiation exposure between 1987 and 2006.
Patients are routinely overexposed to a battery of unnecessary specialists. Jauhar recounts the case of a 50-year-old man admitted for shortness of breath. During a month-long stay that cost upward of $200,000, he was shuffled between 16 different specialists—from podiatrists to thoracic surgeons—and underwent a dozen procedures. He was discharged with minimal improvement. As Dr. Donald Berwick and Dr. Allan Detsky noted in the Journal of the American Medical Association, inpatient care has become a relay race, and “patients are the batons.”
The fragility of this system was brutally exposed during the COVID-19 pandemic. In a landmark November 2020 editorial, the British Medical Journal (BMJ) issued a scathing indictment of the pandemic response in the UK, warning of a global “medical-political complex.”
“When good science is suppressed by the medical-political complex, people die,” declared the editorial, written by executive editor Kamran Abbasi. It highlighted how politicians and governments suppressed scientific truths for political and financial gain. The editorial pointed to the government’s attempt to procure a faulty antibody test, noting that researchers who tried to publish their findings were blocked by the Prime Minister’s Office. Furthermore, key government appointees held worrying conflicts of interest, including shareholdings in companies manufacturing pandemic diagnostics and vaccines.
The BMJ editorial sparked a wave of agreement from eminent medical experts. Respondents highlighted how the hijacking of science by vested interests led to immeasurable collateral harm. Lockdowns and hospital closures, pushed by narratives lacking rigorous scientific basis, disrupted the diagnosis and treatment of other conditions, costing countless lives. Dissenting voices in the medical community were efficiently "no-platformed," while the pandemic facilitated a massive transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich, with billionaires reaping unprecedented profits while ordinary livelihoods were destroyed.
At the core of this crisis is the overwhelming influence of medical multinational corporations. As the late Dr. Arnold Seymour Relman, former Editor-in-Chief of the New England Journal of Medicine, starkly warned: “The medical profession is being bought by the pharmaceutical industry, not only in terms of the practice of medicine, but also in terms of teaching and research. The academic institutions of this country are allowing themselves to be the paid agents of the pharmaceutical industry. I think it is disgraceful.”
Dr. Marcia Angell, Relman’s successor, echoed this sentiment, describing the pharmaceutical industry as “now primarily a marketing machine to sell drugs of dubious benefit,” using its vast wealth to co-opt the US Congress, the FDA, and the medical profession itself. Dr. John Adamson of Harvard Medical School added that the primary purpose of commercially funded clinical research is no longer to improve health, but to “maximize financial return on investment.”
The danger of this corporate dominance is that it prioritizes massive profits over patient safety, rushing drugs and vaccines to market while bypassing rigorous safety protocols.
While the distortions of the profit-driven medical system are highly visible in wealthy nations, the consequences are far more lethal when these models are exported to poorer countries. In places like India, where patients are more vulnerable, less educated, and lack financial safety nets, the "broad daylight dacoity" of corporate healthcare becomes a matter of life and death.
As Dr. Jauhar concludes, “The vast majority of doctors aren't bad. It is the system that makes us bad.” But a diseased system cannot heal itself. There is an urgent, unprecedented need for medical professionals to break their silence and unite with citizen groups. Together, they must challenge and check the big business domination of the medical system before the very foundation of public health is entirely lost to the highest bidder.
---
The writer is Honorary Convener, Campaign to Save Earth Now. His latest books include Planet in Peril, Protecting Earth for Children, Man over Machine and a Day in 2071. His website is bharatdogra.in and his YouTube channel is Bharat Dogra | Save Earth Campaign
Comments