Politicians never lose an opportunity to get traction from a system of controlling prices of cardiac stents as forced by courts and health activists.
I expected the medical profession of the country to welcome the reduction of the prices of cardiac stents by 85 per cent with great jubilation. My expectation, and perhaps also of all those who trust medical professionals, emanated from the simple understanding that doctors have the best interests of patients at heart. A cheap life-saving device would facilitate their ethical commitment to do good for patients. But these expectations were soon belied. Doctors felt insecure, irritated, some even attacking price control and other regulations. Social media was full of lamentations by doctors: “Why do politicians hate us?”, “Society has unreasonable expectations from doctors”, “Lay persons will never understand how hard we work”, “A few bad apples should not make all of us look bad” and, “Why only we?”. Each dismayed remark was invariably followed by a long narrative.
Yet, to use the analogy of a famous TED talk given by renowned psychologist Philip Zimbardo, titled “The Lucifer Effect: The Psychology of Evil”, blaming only doctors as “bad apples” would not do justice to the evil within our healthcare system. Corporates making astronomical profits using unsavoury means, writing off bad debts and making ordinary people pay, allowing top managers to draw obscenely high salaries, all these factors have created too many “bad apples”. Preaching ethics is never going to turn so many bad apples into good ones.
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