As I said earlier, there’s something terribly wrong with the whole notion of patients as “consumers” and health care as simply a financial transaction. Medical care, after all, is an area in which crucial decisions — life and death decisions — must be made. Yet making such decisions intelligently requires a vast amount of specialized knowledge. Furthermore, those decisions often must 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. - Maria Niles