Profit is the world's way of signaling that you are doing something in an efficient, effective, and long-term sustainable way.

So, given that health care is one of the most fundamental individual needs, profit most definitely should be the goal.

But health care is not the most fundamental need -- that would be food. I find it puzzling that people don't apply the same arguement to this need. Why not say that profit shouldn't be the goal of the food industry? And that supermarkets are immoral for making a profit at the expense of hungry people? Well, because it's clearly nonsense, of course.

But I wonder if it would seem like nonsense if we lived in a world where there was no free market in food supply. We might worry that greedy corporations would only be interested in serving expensive foods to rich people.