Healthcare Without Profit: An Embodied Theological Vision

Abstract

Healthcare systems worldwide face a fundamental tension between profit maximization and healing. In the United States, market-driven healthcare has created systemic inequities, operational inefficiencies, and what recent scholarship identifies as physician moral injury-the psychological distress experienced when economic pressures compromise ethical medical practice.

This article examines what healthcare might look like without profit motivation and explores how such transformation aligns with embodied theological understandings of healing as covenant, justice, and divine presence.

We conducted comparative analysis of international healthcare models, integrated findings from health economics literature, and synthesized theological scholarship from Jewish mystical and ethical traditions. The analysis draws extensively from contemporary work on physician moral injury, pharmaceutical industry practices, and institutional coercion in medical settings.

Global healthcare systems treating health as a public good consistently deliver superior outcomes at lower costs compared to profit-driven models. Singlepayer systems achieve 10-20% administrative cost savings while ensuring universal access. Research demonstrates that for-profit healthcare organizations prioritize shareholder returns over patient care, particularly during crises, while nonprofit institutions maintain community focus and quality measures. T heological analysis reveals that profit-driven medicine violates covenantal principles by reducing sacred healing encounters to financial transactions.

Healthcare without profit represents both economically viable policy direction and theologically compelling vision. Removing profit as the organizing principle enables medicine to recover its deepest vocation: honoring human vulnerability, enacting justice, and witnessing divine presence through compassionate care. Implementation requires systematic transformation of financing mechanisms, medical education, and institutional cultures to support covenantal rather than contractual relationships between healers and patients.