Selling Our Souls

Moralizing Markets and Marketing Morality

HolyCare Moralizes the Market

Different practitioners understood the patient’s outburst differently—as a request for help, an indication of mental illness, and an act of aggression

The question of moral hazard is one as old as state social welfare programs.

The philosopher Michael Sandel makes a similar point in a book with a similar title (and identical subtitle), What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets.

Still, over the past forty years, public health concerns, professional autonomy, and charitable impulses have given way even more dramatically to a focus on profit making and the bottom line.

The hospital has a paradoxical place in U.S. society.