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Rhoads, J. "Letter to the Editor: About The Corporatization Deal" Center for Modern Health. September 2025.

Note: The following letter to the editor was submitted to the New England Journal of Medicine in response to the article by Chandra and Shepard, "The Corporatization Deal—Health Care, Investors, and the Profit Priority." It was not accepted for publication, so we are sharing it here.

Chandra and Shepard claim healthcare's "exceptionalism" requires shielding medical practice from investor influence because profit motives allegedly corrupt professional commitment. To the contrary, profit seeking grounded in rational, enlightened self-interest is what best aligns physicians' incentives with patient welfare.

If healthcare appears to work differently than standard markets, it is because we have engineered it to be so through well-intentioned but misguided interventions that distance patients from prices, and by pushing the pleasant-sounding but unrealistic idea that everyone ought to receive all the care they need without consideration for cost.

Healthcare can work like other markets if we let it. For example, changing the tax treatment of insurance to give patients more control over their health care dollars, and allowing solo physicians and corporations to develop and offer a diverse array of services at a wide range of price points would restore market discipline and help align profits with patient value.

The fundamental professional obligation of physicians is to provide value to patients. That is consistent with entrepreneurialism, not anathema to it.

Jared Rhoads is Executive Director of the Center for Modern Health.