Improving Citizens’ Health Competencies

The most destabilizing consequence of the restructuring of the health system has also been, in my view, the most desirable one: patients, payers, and executives of health care organizations now have both higher expectations and greater power. The democratization of choice and the proliferation of decision makers An the Ama [formula omitted]turing of medicine, even after universal health coverage is adopted. But what physicians find most troubling about restructuring is not so much sharing decision making and power with patients and others; it is the nagging, not entirely arrogant or paternalistic, belief that nonphysicians simply do not have the information necessary to make rational decisions about medical care.