The Ethics of Medicine, or Profit is Waste
From a consumer's perspective, any company's profit margin can be seen as wasteful. Naturally no good or service is produced for free. Materials must be bought, workers must be paid, energy must be drawn, infrastructure must be built and everything must be transported. But that is never the total cost of any good or service delivered by a successful business. Some of the money paid towards anything is left over for the owners of the business, this is called the profit. So, when an insurance company or a hospital turns a profit, what they are doing is taking money that people intended to spend on doctors and medicine and funneling it in to the bank accounts of people wealthy enough to invest. In a sense this money is wasted from a patient's point of view, because it did not go towards actually producing what is being consumed.
Of course investing is one of the foundations of our economy, because investors put up the initial capital to start an enterprise. Investors take on risk, and generally people only risk to gain a chance at reward. But are we so sure that healthcare ought to be run like any ordinary industry? Healthcare is literally life and death, and as such any extra resources which are passed on to the consumer increase that consumer's chances of surviving. So, the profits of any insurance company or hospital necessarily come at the expense of people's lives. And the stats prove that our system is very expensive.
Healthcare costs make up a staggering 16% of our gross domestic product. This boils down to an average American spending over $7,400 per year on healthcare. This is half again or even double what other wealthy countries spend per capita, even though Americans have shorter life expectancies and more infant deaths than those other nations. Why is our system so inefficient by comparison? Because it is so profitable for insurance and hospital giants, and profit is arguably just a waste.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_care_compared#International_comparisons