In a perfect world?

Doctors generally do want to help people, but they also have to pay the office payroll and the light bill.

Pharma companies don't need as much profit margin as they have to produce new drugs, but there has to be some incentive.

You've posted this question at a bad time for me; with a chunk of my staff on vacation, I've been pulling some ungodly hours, and I can testify that try as I might my altruism gets spread thin when I'm treating a 3-day-old boil at 3 a.m. in a patient that hasn't tried to pay even $5 on his previous 3 bills but got here in his $30,000 car. One of the charitable benchmarks is that the patient feel worse than the doctor. It shouldn't be, but that's human nature.

Keep in mind that doctors are smarter and harder working than your average person. If they don't have some incentive to practice medicine, they can make more money for less work doing something else.

My answer may be cynical at best.

Let's go back in time to before the gross worship of the almighty dollar. My grandfather was the first president of the charter chapter of the AMA. When he was in practice, he turned NO ONE away. A chicken as payment was not unusual.

It was only with the advent of receptionists well after his death that this started to occur. According to the Hippocratic Oath, no physician can turn away someone in need. Cleverly, their front office can. Nothing like a loop-hole in a capitalistic society.

As for the cost of education and wanting a better life, don't get me started on the sorry pay for the teachers that inspire children to want to be doctors...

I'm not quite sure if I really answered your question. I guess in an ideal world we would have affordable health care, affordable education, and a government that provided and encouraged both.

I think that you are unfortunately forgetting the element of simple greed that is an elementary part of all human beings. People don't just "go into medicine to help others" -- they decide on a career path that will help them to become financially successful and socially prominent. Perhaps there are a very FEW who choose medicine as a career to "help others", but by the time they've had to pay the exhorbitant costs of an education plus all of the expenses and pressures of training, most all thoughts of taking on the enormous risks associated with practicing medicine are left on the wayside. In an ideal world we would still have very flawed human beings who want to have things their way--. so that world would no longer be perfect. Good thoughts and intentions, but very unrealistic.

if the doctor only helped the patients it means that the doctor will not rich until he or she die....

yes yes yes.