Now that I am finally ready to work, what will my job look like?

Anyone entering or even thinking about the field of medicine knows that the training is long and rigrous, and finacially it will be an investment without any immediate returns well into your late 20's. Now as I get ready to graduate and enter the world as a working adult, I am beginning to ponder what will my job look like in the next 5 years or the next 20? The healthcare industry, for long an economically unsustainable and socially inequal field, now totters on the verge of collapse. The number of uninsured has mushroomed to 45 million while the insurance premiums double every few years for those who do manage to get employer-paid insurance. Health care reform and universal healthcare in some avatar or other seems inevitable. Add to that the slow pace of tort reform and the ever-inceasing malpractice insurance rates in this highly litigous society.
I anticipate practicing in a vastly different scenario than the one that existed for the generation of doctors before mine. Private practices are becoming an icon of the past, and patients are now thought of as "consumers" or "clients". The whole ethos of medicine seems to have chaged to bring medicine, a field traditionally ensconced in the halo of selfless service, more in alignment with the modern realities of business and individual choice. Doctors are hardly known for standing up for themselves until almost too late. We are usually so wrapped up in the cozy prestige of the profession that we assume society will take care of us. Maybe that's why while labor laws for most fields came into being early in the last century, the 80-hour workweek rule for medical residents was instituted only a few years ago. While insurance companies spent several decades finessing how to cheat doctors and patients out of resources to increase their profits, physician led organizations such as the AMA have only begun to fight for dramatic cuts in physician compensation in the last 5 years or so.
As government now focuses its sight on doing something about the flawed idea of employer /individual insurance that leaves many with little option but to use the emergency rooms as the one and only stop for healthcare, I wonder what does that mean for future practitioners of medicine? As the insurance billing nightmare grows bigger, many doctors are looking to less patient-oriented but more paying options to make a living. Discussions of entering into lucrative healthcare-related business ventures such as MRI/CT Imaging centers or getting special training to do mundane but well-compensated procedures are not uncommon among newly graduated physicians. It makes me sad that at the end of 7-10 years of medical training, their mindset is hardly different form that of a new MBA grad dreaming up business ventures. So is medicine then really just another form of business? What will the job that awaits me in the real world really look like 5-6 years from now? Will it fail to meet the basic expectations that I had of the field of medicine on entering it? Will I have to compromise the ideals of service and patient care so that I can make my ends meet? These are scary questions. I can only hope that the answers can be more favorable if sought collectively rather than for each physician as an individual.