In many ways, the problems of modem health care mirror the same transitional difficulties other industries have experienced in the last decade. Market principles dictate standardization and quantification. Costs, in order to be controlled, must be identified, categorized and limited. This methodology may work efficiently with commodities, but more and more physicians and nurses are realizing that it is fraught with pitfalls when applied to human beings. Medicine is as much art as science, and art by committee cannot, by its very definition, approach the quality that can be attained when individual genius is combined with inspiration.
Human biology has as many variations as there are humans.
Whenever systems developed to process commodities with a finite number of variations are applied to a commodity which has infinite variations, a percentage of that product will be lost in the form of spoilage during processing. It is considered an inevitable and fixed cost, built into the system. This irreconcilable collision of philosophies lies at the heart of the for-profit health care controversy.