Sachin Jain, President and CEO at SCAN Group & Health Plan, shared on LinkedIn:
“Most of us entered healthcare with noble intentions.
We said we wanted ‘to help people.’ We believed we could ‘do well by doing good.’
But years into our careers, too many of us find ourselves rationalizing behaviors that harm the very people we set out to serve.
That slow drift has a name: ethical erosion. It rarely happens in a single dramatic moment.
Instead, it unfolds through a thousand small compromises:
- The administrator who justifies aggressive billing as a way to ‘keep the lights on.’
- The pharma executive who prices a drug out of reach but says it’s necessary ‘to fund research.’
- The insurer who issues denials and calls it ‘policy compliance.’
Each choice may feel defensible in isolation.
Together, they corrode the moral fabric of healthcare.
We often point to a ‘broken system’ as the culprit.
And yes, the system is flawed.
But systems are made up of people.
Our rationalizations, our compromises, our willingness to hide behind the system – that’s what allows brokenness to persist. Every so often, we experience moments of clarity – those piercing realizations that remind us of why we came here in the first place.
The challenge is making those moments last longer, and acting on them before they fade.
Healthcare doesn’t just need more money, technology, or policy reforms. It needs moral courage.
The courage to resist ethical erosion.
The courage to align our actions with the values we put on the wall.
Because if erosion happens gradually, so can renewal.
I discuss this renewal in my latest Forbes column.”
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