But I *Like* Being a Medical Consumer

Or, NPR's second installment on the cost of U.S. health care. This one is about the role that patients play in raising health care costs.

Or, NPR’s second installment on the cost of U.S. health care. This one is about the role that patients play in raising health care costs.

The gist of it is that people have "transformed from passive ‘patients’ who almost blindly follow the doctor’s orders — until the 1980s, patients regularly took pills without even knowing what they were for — into active and aggressive ‘consumers’ of health services."

There are benefits to that: patients being more understanding of and involved in their own treatment, patients being able to call attention to something a provider might have overlooked. There are also drawbacks: patients inexpertly and inaccurately self-diagnosing, patients pushing for treatments where the negatives outweigh the positives.

And, of course, we’re back to the unhappy bottom line of providers often feeling like they must order these tests and procedures and prescribe those medications, or else they risk getting sued. Which, as we’ve already established, sucks rotten sour monkey balls.

I see the drawbacks of this setup on a pretty personal basis. No fewer than 3 members of my family have asked for and are currently being prescribed medications — of the habit-forming variety — that they maybe should not have been taking for as long as they have been. This harms them and costs "the system" money. While other people’s personal health matters are technically none of my business, this still upsets me in ways I can’t explain.

Still, I’m not sure that this new "health service consumer" is necessarily a bad thing.

No, that’s wrong. What I mean is that I am sure that "health care consumers" can definitely be bad things, at least sometimes — but I sure as fuck don’t want to stop being one.

I like being able to research health information and potential treatments on my own. I like knowing complete information about medications, procedures, and devices beforehand — because very often, the information my provider gives me is not as complete as the information I find for myself. (That’s not at all a blame thing. Health care providers are busy people, and I have mad Google Fu skillz.) Moreover, I like to believe that my consumer-based activities have had a positive impact on my overall health — though since it’s one of those "the road not taken" scenarios, it’s probably impossible to say for sure.

Which is sort of the thing. If patients always made "wise" medical consumer decisions, I don’t think it would be an issue. No one really complains about procedures that are necessary or medications that are unequivocally treating something.

But the reality is that things do not always work this way. We’re socialized to accept consumerism in so many facets of our lives that when it comes to our health, it’s easy to adopt the same thought processes. When we measure medical advances by the yardstick of "more is better," it can be easy to think we should want something because it’s "new and improved" or "as seen on TV."

And I guess the end question is, how long can we keep paying for things that don’t serve us or that we don’t really need?