How to Fix Healthcare:
Healthcare at a Crossroads
Physicians are overworked, underpaid, and forced to prioritize efficiency over patient care. The leadership making these decisions—hospital administrators, insurance executives, and corporate boards—are often far removed from the realities of patient care, yet they dictate policies that hurt both doctors and patients.
How Corporate-Run Healthcare Fails Doctors and Patients:
Physicians as "Hamsters on a Wheel" – More patients, less time per visit, and increasing administrative burdens mean doctors are burning out at alarming rates.
Profit Over Care, Reduced Physician Autonomy – Decisions about patient care are often dictated by insurers or hospital administrators rather than doctors themselves.
Lower Pay, Higher Debt – Physicians take on massive student loan debt, but corporate-run healthcare forces them into lower-paying, high-stress environments while executives take home multi-million-dollar salaries.
Patient Care Suffers – Shorter appointments, staff shortages, and administrative red tape mean patients don’t get the attention and care they deserve.
The Solution? Put Healthcare Back in the Hands of Physicians and Patients
- Ensure doctors are paid fairly and can focus on patient care rather than corporate profit margins.
- Eliminating private insurance middlemen would allow physicians to practice medicine rather than spend hours dealing with billing and insurance approvals.
- Fair wages and working conditions would reduce burnout and ensure that medicine remains an attractive profession.
Physicians train for years to provide quality care, yet they’re treated like cogs in a machine while hospital CEOs and shareholders rake in billions. If we truly valued healthcare, the system would be designed around doctors and patients—not profits.
Do physicians need to organize more forcefully—perhaps through unions or advocacy groups—to push back against corporate control?
Absolutely! Physicians need to reclaim medicine from the hands of administrators and corporate executives who prioritize profits over patient care. Right now, too many decisions in healthcare are made by people who have never treated a patient, yet they dictate policies that increase workload, cut pay, and interfere with medical judgment.
How Physicians Can Take Back Medicine:
Form Stronger Unions & Advocacy Groups - Doctors need to collectively push back against exploitative working conditions. Unions can negotiate better pay, reasonable patient loads, and reduced administrative burdens.
Eliminate Excessive Administrators - Hospitals and insurance companies are overloaded with executives and bureaucrats who contribute nothing to patient care. Shifting resources back to doctors and nurses would improve efficiency and patient outcomes.
Move Toward a Physician-Led, Nonprofit Healthcare System - Physicians, not businesspeople, should be making healthcare decisions. Removing profit motives would allow for better patient care, fair wages, and lower costs.
Push for Policy Change - Eliminate the insurance middlemen who drive up costs and interfere with medical decisions. Public awareness campaigns can highlight how corporate healthcare harms both patients and doctors.
Refuse to Work for Exploitative Systems - More doctors could move to direct primary care (DPC) models, cutting out insurance companies altogether. Physician-owned cooperatives and nonprofit hospital models could be an alternative to corporate-controlled systems.
The fact that administrators and insurance executives make millions while doctors are overworked and patients suffer is unacceptable. Medicine should be led by those who actually care for patients, not those who care about profits.
Do you think there’s a growing movement among physicians to take back control?
Physicians go into medicine to care for patients, not to be trapped in a broken system that prioritizes profits over health. A physician-led strike or large-scale movement could be the wake-up call needed to force change.
How a Physician Strike Could Work:
Organize Through Unions & Medical Societies - Doctors need a unified voice to push back against corporate greed.Existing groups like the AMA or specialty organizations could be leveraged, or new physician-led unions could be formed.
Target Specific Issues for Reform - Demand fair wages and reduced workload so physicians can spend quality time with patients.
Cut administrative bloat—hospitals should be run by doctors, not by profit-driven CEOs.Advocate for the removal of middlemen, who complicate care and drive up costs.
Mass Walkouts & Work Stoppages - A coordinated national or regional walkout (except for emergency care) would highlight how essential physicians are.Strikes have worked in other countries, forcing governments and hospital systems to negotiate.
Educate & Involve the Public - Patients need to understand that a physician strike isn’t about greed—it’s about saving healthcare from corporate exploitation. Public pressure can help shift policy, just like it has for nurses' strikes and teachers' unions.
Create Alternatives to Corporate Healthcare - If the system won’t change, physicians can build their own networks—like nonprofit hospitals or direct primary care (DPC) models—to bypass the broken system entirely.
The biggest challenge is that physicians are so dedicated to their patients that striking feels impossible. But if the system remains the same, burnout, worsening patient care, and physician shortages will only get worse.
Physician Strikes and Healthcare Reform
Physicians across the U.S. have increasingly considered strikes as a means to advocate for better working conditions and patient care standards. For instance, in January 2025, doctors affiliated with NYC Health + Hospitals issued a 10-day strike notice, highlighting issues like staffing shortages and the need for improved contracts.
While strikes can be a powerful tool for change, they also raise ethical questions due to the potential impact on patient care. A recent perspective piece emphasizes the need for regulatory reforms to address the rising trend of physician strikes, aiming to balance physicians' rights with patient safety.