That was your first clue? 
No, I don’t think I made myself clear. Like I said, I like “the way the writers use the medical situations as vehicles for exposing the characters’ values and viewpoints.” My point is that – and this is only my opinion – the writers have more subtlety than a typical soap opera (or other medical drama). Rather than simply: guy has strange symptoms, can House save him?, we get: guy has strange symptoms, won’t fess up to a key piece of information needed to save him, which then somehow works to bring attention to (or act as a metaphor for) some other interaction going on between other characters.
For instance, the lesbians couple – the sick one is contemplating breaking the relationship off, while the other is going to risk her life in donating a body part (or whatever the setup was). We find out at the end that, contrary to Cameron’s sanctimonious beliefs, the donor already knows her partner was going to leave her – and was willing to be a donor just because the obligation would be so strong that her partner couldn’t leave her. The medical case acts as a vehicle through which we get to see Cameron’s world-view shaken. And, if I recall correctly, it went a step further – it seemed to me that it made Cameron look at the Foreman publishing incident differently, in that suddenly the world looked kinda green, rather than rose-colored.
When the show (hypothetically) has Cuddy and Wilson arguing over which pre-school to send their kid to, while Foreman packs up and heads for Africa, forsaking his hyper-competitive ways because he underwent an epiphany about how much good he can do in the world, all because his (relatively newly-introduced) fiance contracted and rapidly died from AIDS, while Chase takes up the mantle of Dr. Kevorkian, revealed as an manifestation of the crisis in faith that caused him to leave the seminary, in this case, brought about by the loss of his father, but – lo, and behold! – he rediscovers his faith and joins Foreman in Africa (because the cute one can’t be portrayed as a bad person), and Cameron, well…
…I’ll have been long gone. Yes, the characters are what makes it interesting, but once it strays too far from the medical cases, I see it as inevitably ending up in ER-hell.