The Doctor is kidnapped and forced to work in a hospital.
An alien trader named Gar steals the Doctor's mobile emitter and sells it to a crowded hospital, where Administrator Chellick sets him to work. The hospital's computer, the Allocator, rations medicine by each patient's value to society, so the poor on the lower level are denied drugs that patients on the upper level receive as routine preventive care.
The Doctor smuggles medicine to the lower level to treat patients such as Tebbis, a young man whose illness could be cured, but Chellick finds out. While Voyager tracks him down, the Doctor infects Chellick with Tebbis's illness so the Allocator will deny him care, forcing Chellick to change the system. Voyager then rescues the Doctor. The seventh-season episode is a pointed satire of health care rationing and of choosing who is worth saving, and it ends with the Doctor learning that his ethical programming did not fail, so the decision was his own.