It’s complicated. Hospitals aren’t necessarily making big bucks.
They have insane expenses. There are lots investments that are recouped in the doctors office: paying for medical school, buying downtown real estate, decades of medical research, etc.
Nobody says “we have $50 million to invest, let’s build a hospital.” Although investors occasionally buy them.
I don’t think US hospitals are for profit in the sense they have shareholder demanding a return on investment.
Doctors who have the ability to make lots of cash usually break out on their own asap.
So there’s probably some profit seeking, but not a lot.
I know plenty of folks who work for non-profit hospitals, and it’s a total mess. But it it’s usually organization chaos, and not profit seeking.
But I’ve heard stories of venture capital firms buying and shutting down hospitals, but never building them.
The pharma-hospital-insurance complex. The same non-profit hospitals in which at least one person you're seen by will be out of your insurance network because it makes more money for the hospital. The same pharma companies which evergreen and lobby for drugs to be ruled unsafe once patent rights run out. The same AMA that limits the number of doctors and ensures they are paid more than any other country while patients wait months for availability. The same insurance companies which intentionally hide their deals with hospitals to obscure the true cost of Healthcare services.
It's not a shadowy cabal deciding to make medicine worse to profit more, the sociopathy is efficiently diffused between everyone involved, many of whom work their asses off in incredibly stressful environments for a tiny share of these profits, powerless to change anything about the system.
But for purposes of discussion, it's one industry and it's fucking broken. It is impossible to fix anything by changing only one piece of this.
Doctors and other medical professionals working for the govt or qualified non-profits can get some or all of their loans forgiven or paid for. Not to mention there are specific programs to reduce it in general since they are in high demand. Some states are so desperate for doctors they will put you through medical school for free if you agree to work in state for a few years after.
I could accept these as true if the effect was comparable to any other place in the world. It's not. So either Americans are uniquely bad at trying really hard, or the system is set up with different goals in mind.
I'm talking about one thing, it's why healthcare in America sucks, and it has many reasons. Your point, which is that each of the major players in this game really are just trying to do their jobs the best, is the problem. There aren't easy solutions but we at least need to admit we have a problem.