Morals, Markets, and Medicine

ABSTRACT Healthcare in the United States is defined by profit motives and economic inequality, yet medical providers and organizations are also guided by moral values such as a commitment to patient well‐being. How have sociologists made sense of this apparent contradiction? This review evaluates the contributions of social scientists to the understanding of morality and economic exchange in medicine. It focuses on the burgeoning moral markets literature, which examines how moral categorizations concerning economic exchanges emerge, are contested, and change over time and across regional contexts, as it has been applied to medical cases. We argue that this approach has advanced sociology scholarship in three major ways: (1) allowing for the interrogation of the moral dimensions of medical commodification; (2) exposing surprising dynamics of medical markets; and (3) underlining the negotiation of meaning among providers, patients, and other medical actors. We then extend the moral markets theoretical toolkit beyond the arenas where it has been most fruitfully applied and suggest how it can illuminate emerging topics such as the incursion of Big Tech into healthcare, the introduction of AI into medical practice, and managing medical debt through novel strategies such as crowdfunding.