In his essential book, *#BeingMortal*, #AtulGawande describes how end-of-life care that centers a dying person's priorities can make death a dignified and even satisfying process for the patient and their loved ones:
https://atulgawande.com/book/being-mortal/
But that dignity comes from a patient-centered approach, not a profit-centered one.
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Doctors are required to put their patients' interests first, and while they sometimes fail at this (everyone is fallible), the professionalization of medicine, through which doctors were held to ethical standards ahead of monetary considerations, proved remarkable durable.
Partly that was because doctors generally worked for themselves - or for other doctors.
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In most states, it's illegal for practices to be owned by non-MDs, and historically, only a small fraction of MDs worked for hospitals, subject to administration by businesspeople rather than doctors.
That was radically altered by private equity's entry into healthcare, with waves of consolidation that saw local hospitals merged into massive national chains, and private practices scooped up and turned into profit-maximizers, not health-maximizers:
https://prospect.org/health/2023-08-02-qa-corporate-medicine-destroys-doctors/
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