In reply to:
And altruistic, however close, is somewhat more akin to charity set ups and medicine is most definitely not that!
I disagree that altruism pertains to charity. One can give to charity and be quite egotistical about it. Altruism (as it pertains to medicine) is a matter of putting the patient's needs ahead of your own. Altruism is not a matter of declining compensation for work (not exactly the same as profit, by the way). A physician who agrees to waive his fee but makes the patient wait three hours while he finishes a round of golf before before performing any medical service is not being especially altruistic. A physician who spends 6 weeks a year performing surgery (with no financial compensation) in El Salvador on pediatric patients with cleft palates is doing something both charitable and altruistic. The orgnaization Doctors Without Borders is devoted to doing work that is both charitable and altruistic. A hospital that continues to run a department that is not especially profitable, such as pediatrics, is doing so because to simply refuse to treat children would be unethical in light the altruistic expectations of the profession. A hospital uses the monies of more profitable departments such as surgery or radiation oncology to help support less profitable (or even money-losing) departments.
In contrast, a strictly for-profit business such as, say, the Coca-Cola Company, would be perfectly willing to completely drop a line of product that wasn't sufficiently profitable and invest their capital those products with the highest rate of return. This is because their primary aim is make a profit, and the product itself has no value beyond its ability to generate profit.
