The Illness of Seeing Patients as Customers
Here.
Libertarians, My Libertarians!
Cruel to be kind means that I love you . Because, while I think you are mistaken, your hearts are in the right place -- yes, even you, Silas -- unlike some people . This Breitbart fellow (discussed in the link above), by all appearances, deliberately doctored a video of Shirley Sherrod to make her remarks appear virulently racist, when they had, in fact, the opposite import. I heard that at a recent Austrian conference, some folks were talking about "Callahan's conservative turn." While that description is not entirely inaccurate, I must say that a lot of these people who today call themselves conservative give me the heebie-jeebies.
Believe it or not, I'm actually in agreement with you on much of this topic. Where I think you err, rather, is this: in modern policy, patients are already seen as customers, and most policy debates hinge on whether to treat them as customers this way vs. that way. None of the major proposals (including those of Krugman, who IIRC you cited as showing outrage at the idea of seeing patients as customers) would change this.
ReplyDeleteSo it seems like a red herring: if you have an idea that would bring about a paradigm shift away from patient-as-customer, bring it up, but otherwise, the criticism is irrelevant. (One example of someone doing it right is Kevin Carson, who has concrete proposals for "mutualist medicine" and how it would bring back the social aspect of care.)
And, not that it matters, but actually practicing non-monetary mutualist medicine would contract GDP...