Wealth & Money Quote by Jack Kevorkian

Kevorkian draws a hard moral border with the bluntness of someone who expects to be called monstrous and would rather be accused than misunderstood. “A transfer of money should never be involved” isn’t just etiquette; it’s an argument about contamination. If assisted death is going to claim the status of a “profound situation,” it can’t be allowed to share oxygen with profit. Money doesn’t merely complicate the act, in his framing; it cheapens it, turns a final human decision into a transaction and invites the oldest suspicion in medicine: that someone benefits when you don’t.

The pivot is the deliberately uneasy concession: illness is “profound, too,” and yet we’ve normalized medicine as commerce. The subtext is a charge of hypocrisy. Society can tolerate pricing the struggle to stay alive - insurance networks, billing codes, “out-of-network” penalties - but suddenly becomes purist when the care is about ending suffering. Kevorkian’s jab lands because it uses medicine’s existing marketplace logic as a mirror: if we already accept that survival is for sale, why pretend that death must be protected from the same incentives unless we’re really protecting ourselves from the discomfort of choice?

Context matters: he’s speaking as the face of a movement that courts backlash, in an era when “death panels” paranoia and for-profit healthcare were both politically combustible. The repetition - “It’s a business” - is less explanation than verdict, meant to make the listener feel the chill of a system where even compassion can be itemized.