Fantastic thought-provoking points here. You're right, that's something I had kinda forgotten about when I wrote before:

Helping-professionals are (ideally) in those professions to help people, so their employers essentially hold patients/clients/students up as shields.

You're right, to change things would require a cultural shift that sees providers as "people" rather than "services." But generally it would be an extremely difficult PR war to sell to the people who require such services.

The soulless bosses are basically comic book villains: They know heroes will put themselves at considerable risk for the greater good, but won't risk the harming of innocents...

...so the greedy ownership class hides behind those innocents and, what's worse, trains them to accept such a low standard that any action that would drop that standard would turn the peoples' anger against the heroes who already sacrifice so much to help them.

I hate not knowing what to do past understanding what's so wrong. :(