Krugman: Patients or Consumers

Sooner or later this blog was going to take a turn towards the nursing and health policy world. This brief post from Paul Krugman points out the implications of calling people consumers — rather than patients — when they receive medical care.

Medical care is an area in which crucial decisions — life and death decisions — must be made; yet making those decisions intelligently requires a vast amount of specialized knowledge; and often those decisions must also be made under conditions in which the patient is incapacitated, under severe stress, or needs action immediately, with no time for discussion, let alone comparison shopping.