Early in the twentieth century, courts in several states ruled that companies generally could not directly sell medical services because a company could not hold a medical license—an inversion of the “corporations are people” doctrine later established by several court cases in other industries—and that medicine should be free of commercial motivations. These legal prohibitions against the “corporate practice of medicine” eventually spread to thirty-three states. The party line among doctors was that keeping third parties like corporations out of medicine was about doing what was best for the
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