“Political language is designed….to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.” - Politics and the English Language, George Orwell
As our health care responsibilities have increased in scope, health policy experts and decision makers have found the simple words “people” and “patients” inadequate to describe us. In their place, they now call us “consumers” of health care – and when we do so knowledgeably, they tell us we are “empowered.”
Both of these new words are consonant with the optimistic American rhetoric used on political campaign trails. When they are used to describe our effort to find good care, which is now fraught with complicated, expensive challenges, these words direct attention away from actually reducing the real barriers we face in finding good care and making the most of it.
I provide a detailed account of how this happens in this essay and talk about Name Calling in Health Care with Taunya English in this interview on NPR station WHYY.
Tags: Empowered Patient, health care consumer, LinkedIn, NewsWorks, WHYY
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excellent interview, clear and to the point. One of the tensions in our democracy is that given the complex nature of our most pressing problems we are very dependent on experts to help us sort thru what may be happening in our lives and what if anything we can do about it. This shift in circumstances calls for a new vocabulary (and new understandings/relationships) that does not fall back into the triumphal individualism of the postWWII American economic bubble.
We need to come to terms with limitations,complexity, uncertainty, and even mortality if we are to get better at forging mutual relationships that reflect the existential and material realities of our unfolding lives together.