Sometimes doctors do good work, sometimes the medical-industrial complex makes work for itself. When insurance is paying the bills, no one has to care about effectiveness or costs.

Elisabeth Rosenthal recently published An American Sickness. These lines from Insurance policy: How an industry shifted from protecting patients to seeking profit [0] concisely summarize the medical industry's current business model:

>> The very idea of health insurance is in some ways the original sin that catalyzed the evolution of today’s medical-industrial complex.

>> The people who founded the Blue Cross Association in Texas nearly a century ago had no idea how their innovation would spin out of control. They intended it to help the sick. And, in the beginning, it did.

>> A hundred years ago medical treatments were basic, cheap and not terribly effective. Often run by religious charities, hospitals were places where people mostly went to die. “Care,” such as it was, was delivered at dispensaries by doctors or quacks for minimal fees.

[0] http://stanmed.stanford.edu/2017spring/how-health-insurance-...

Court-ordered psychiatry is the biggest racket of all because the doctors (who think they know what they're doing) don't have to get their patients' informed consent [1] before hurting them.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Informed_consent

edit: 'racket' above changed to 'business model'