Dramatic contentions by the New York Times that the healthcare establishment has little incentive to control diabetes because treating the devastating consequences is so much more lucrative. “It’s almost as though the system encourages people to get sick and then people get paid to treat them,” one observer is quoted as saying starkly. However, I don’t think this is as nefarious as the sensationalistic spin suggests. It has been a perennial struggle to get the industry to fund wellness and preventive care, and there are complicated reasons why it does not happen, but they do not include powerful interests explicitly making sure that people do not get better because it is more profitable to treat them when they are sicker. Healthcare, of course, has long been dominated and defined by physicians who specialize in treating illness rather than maintaining health. Modern medicine has scored monumental success with intensive interventions in acute problems and in general flounders in approaching the more chronic insidious degenerative and lifestyle-related health problems that become more and more prominent on the healthcare landscape in the industrialized world. And the focus on the quick fix rather than the subtle holistic process is something endemic to the Western mindset. So I’m afraid the type of problem highlighted by this Times exposé will not be fixed by sensationalistic investigative reporting, legislative reforms or judicial proceedings as much as consciousness-raising and philosophical debate.