Physician-owned (even for-profit) hospitals historically provided the best care. The ACA ("Obamacare") outlawed new physician-owned hospitals. Now we find that PE-owned hospitals both cost more and provide worse care.
Physician owned was a joke of a marketing term. Physicians have the exact same incentives as business people - especially at a leadership level. It’s all about the money.
I think this is more about the retaliation of "having earned it/more," for all the decades of sacrifice becoming a thankless-physician entails. Money is a simple metric for simple people, but yes, absolutely it's about the money to a lot of people.
I dropped out after the first year, because I realized I would self-delete (at some point) should I continue on the careerpath to physicianhood. I am so grateful to still be here, xx years later, doing anything else:
If you want to help people and/or make lots of money, there are dozens of other career opportunities to do BOTH more-easily/better.
The thing is they types of physicians that become leaders at hospitals aren't the same ones who are in it "for the medicine". They're essentially MBA types with a medical degree. Many of them are largely removed from day-to-day medicine.
I don't really mean this as a dig at them either. It's just the way of business. High level leadership takes a certain type of person to survive and thrive. This tends to be people who want to optimize the value of every hour they spend working.
I agree with a lot of what you've said. However, I know from experience these "MBA types with a medical degree" (why not "medical types with an MBA", btw?) don't stop caring about patients. Sure, there are a few who worship the almighty dollar above all else, but IME* a real concern for patients is still the foundation of their worldview. I will take a hospital run by business-minded physicians all day over a hospital run by business-minded ... businessmen.
Neither patient protection nor affordable care.